The Future of Simulation is Here

Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, OH, part of the OhioHealth system, opened what may be the largest simulation education center in the country in June. Many of the technologies featured in this 20,000-sq.-ft. facility have never been used outside of a military environment. Costing $3 million to build and another $2 million in operating costs, the center was funded by a foundation started more than 30 years ago by the hospital’s own medical staff.

The Center for Medical Education and Innovation (CME&I), located in the McConnell Heart Hospital at Riverside, will be used to educate healthcare providers through the entire continuum of care. Medical professionals will be able to follow patient simulators from an emergency paramedic response site to an emergency room to an operating room to a post-op patient exam room. Additionally, team training scenarios, often cited as an essential element in addressing patient safety concerns, offer the highest levels of clinical integration and excellence.

The heart of the program is the Virtual Care Unit (VCU), utilizing technology developed by Sarasota, FL-based METI (Medical Education Technologies, Inc.). Four separate hospital environments, including an operating room, a trauma unit, an ICU room and a standard patient room, feature four adult and one pediatric simulators, as well as an infant simulator, many of which are capable of more than 72,000 physiologic responses.

“Drivers” in the VCU’s central control room will be able to run separate scenarios in each of the rooms simultaneously, or raise the walls between the rooms for mass-casualty exercises in emergency medical response. This is the first non-military site to combine VCU technology with disaster preparedness and MCI training. Activity in the rooms will be recorded with cameras and patient responses on computers for review and assessment.

“Until now, it has remained nearly impossible to create scenarios that sufficiently allow medical professionals to step outside their individual professions and practice as a team,” says Lou Oberndorf, president and CEO of METI, “from first responders arriving on the scene, treating and transporting, to nurses in the ED, to doctors in the OR and post-op, etc.—just as in real life.”

Additionally, the Laboratory Skills Center (LSC) offers a variety of clinical simulators, including trainers for airway management, laparoscopic techniques and delivering babies. The Cardiac and Endovascular Simulation Lab (the SimSuite) is a specialized environment developed by the Medical Simulation Corporation that features “Simantha,” a patient simulator that offers verbal feedback about how she is “feeling,” while vital sign monitors give clinical feedback. There are also simulated patient exam rooms where actors stand in as patients, helping healthcare professionals work on their interpersonal and communications skills.

Beginning in January 2006, the center will be available for organizations not affiliated with OhioHealth to schedule events. To learn more, call 614/566-CMEI (2634), or visit www.ohiohealth.com/riverside. —KR

EMS Workforce Project Moves Ahead

In response to the growing concern over workforce shortages across the country, representatives from 17 national organizations and a number of federal agencies have formed the EMS Workforce for the 21st Century proj­ect to study the problem.

In late 2004, a steering committee was formed, which includes EMS publisher John Becknell, Gregg Margolis from the National Registry of EMTs, Rick Patrick from VFIS, San Francisco paramedic Jane Smith, Ed Wetzel from AMR, and several researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The committee met first in February in San Francisco, then as part of a larger steering committee in late April in Washington, DC. The project is funded through a partnership between the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) EMS for Children program.

“In the next 1½ years, we’ve tasked UCSF with doing a comprehensive analysis of the workforce issue, looking at broad economic trends and comparing trends in the EMS workforce with trends in other allied healthcare professions,” says NHTSA Project Officer Gamunu “Gam” Wijetunge. “One of the issues in EMS has always been the lack of data, so the UCSF researchers will get input from the national organizations and others and combine that with data from the federal level and some of the organizations’ workforce databases. Out of that analysis will come an assessment of the EMS workforce, as well as some primary recommendations on what needs to be done to maintain the viability of the workforce over the next 20–30 years.”

Project organizers are developing a website that will be operational in the next few weeks, where providers will be able to ask questions, as well as furnish input to the committee based on their own experiences.

For more information on the EMS Workforce Project, email gamunu.wijetunge@nhtsa.dot.gov, or call 202/493-2793. —MN