Medical Simulation Training Enhances Inter professional Care Delivery

The landscape of healthcare delivery is evolving. More and more concentration is being placed on patient-centered care, a style of clinical practice that encourages patients and their families to take an active role in making decisions regarding their treatment regimen. Likewise, the Institute of Medicine defines patient-centered care as: "Providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values, and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions."

Patient-centered care is linked to evidence-based behavioral practice(EBBP). According to the EBBP project, EBBP "entails making decisions about how to promote health or provide care by integrating the best available evidence with practitioner expertise and other resources, and with the characteristics, state, needs, values and preferences of those who will be affected. This is done in a manner that is compatible with the environmental and organizational context. Evidence is comprised of research findings derived from the systematic collection of data through observation and experiment and the formulation of questions and testing of hypotheses."

Also closely connected to patient-centered care is inter professional care – and inter professional education is gaining traction. In clinical practice, interprofessional care has a positive, tangible influence on service quality and patient outcomes. A single patient may be treated by doctors—as well as nurse practitioners, physician's assistants, therapists, and more within a single clinical treatment, all with the purpose of improved care delivery and reduced medical errors. But communication skills are key. Because these professional care providers likely weren't educated together, and may in fact have varied or even disparate ideas regarding treatment methods, it's essential that they learn to work together in an effective manner before they treat a patient. Medical simulation training can facilitate this process.

Medical simulation training for interprofessional care delivery allows clinicians to hone communication skills – for instance, how a physician might ask a nurse to run a test; or how a nurse might relay patient history or family health information to a physician's assistant – in a safe environment. At no point in time is a patient's safety jeopardized because during the simulation, the patient isn't real. In most cases, he is instead a high-fidelity human patient simulator (mannequin), or a standardized patient (SP, or actor) who has studied one or more clinical conditions to the point of being able to accurately portray and describe their symptoms.

For heightened authenticity, the simulation may even include both mannequins and SPs. For example, two "patients" could have been brought into the emergency room following an automobile accident: a mother and a child. The mother has only sustained minor injuries, but the child has been taken to intensive care for suspected internal bleeding. But here the mother is an actress and the child is a mannequin who can talk, bleed – even blink and give off vital signs readings – with the help of a simulation tech or lab control room operator. This givesinterprofessional trainees the opportunity to communicate and display empathy to the" mother" while also providing active care to the "child."

Whether the medical simulation trainingexerciseinvolves a routine osteopathic examination or an emergency event (or code, as previously described), the clinicians are able to suspend their sense of disbelief in order to "treat" the patient, make notations on a simulated electronic health record (EHR), and recommend a course of treatment, all while improving their professional-to-professional and professional-to-patient communication skills, aptitude forcognitive reasoning, and ability to not only work as a complete, seamless care delivery team—but to excel as one and thereby boost patient care and clinical outcomes.

Linking the threads of patient-centered care and evidence-based behavioral practice, medical simulation training for interprofessional education is becoming a more common element in medical school curricula nation wide. And as industry experts and analysts point to inter professional education as a way to circumvent the nation's looming physician shortage – here to allow highly educated and certified but non-physician primary caregivers greater leeway to provide high-quality healthcare, a policy that will be especially welcome in rural communities – this trend can only be expected to continue.

Yes, landscape of healthcare delivery is evolving – but maximized resources and flexible healthcare workforces certainly don't equate to lower care standards. Learn more about clinical simulation at www.SIMULATIONiQ.com.

About The Author:

The author of the article has extensive experience in the field of Medical Simulation Training and EMS A-V Simulation.

The writer is an expert in the field of music gifts with focus on Musical Jewelry Boxes & Musical Gift.