As the annual event known as Healthcare Simulation Week came to a close on September 19, the School of Nursing and Health Studies sent a special shout out to the sim team at S.H.A.R.E. - Simulation Hospital Advancing Research and Education™ for their amazing work improving patient safety year-round.
“Our team of nurse specialists and simulation technologists work hard every day to provide our students with realistic simulated experiences in a safe learning environment,” said Donna McDermott, Ph.D., RN, CHSE, Associate Dean for Simulation Programs. “I’m so proud to celebrate them and S.H.A.R.E. this week!"
As usual, the week was a busy one. From the emergency department to the operating rooms, the team orchestrated a full schedule of health care simulation activities for hundreds of students, not to mention gathering for a team photo and attending a cupcake celebration with SONHS Dean Cindy L. Munro.
Midway through Healthcare Simulation Week, John O'Donnell, of WISER and the University of Pittsburgh, closed out the 2021 S.H.A.R.E. Lecture Series by talking about “Simulation as Translational Science: Targeting Educational and Practice Gaps.”
Addressing some 90 attendees via Zoom, O’Donnell, Dr.P.H., RN, CRNA, CHSE, FSSH, FAANA, provided fascinating insights about the future of competency-based health care education and the many exciting ways in which simulation teaching activities are being translated to positive effect from nursing programs to health care systems.
“We’re moving towards competency-based education in health care,” said O’Donnell before going on to explain what that future looks like and the mounting evidence for it. “Competency-based assessment is coming to all of us.”
He mentioned that the Winter Institute for Simulation, Education, and Research (WISER), where is associate director, had 13,000 face-to-face simulation encounters during the pandemic without a single transmission of COVID-19. “We learned we could do it successfully and safely, despite some of the challenges,” O’Donnell noted.
Looking to the future, he outlined gaps that health care simulation can help to bridge, such as the interprofessional gap between the physicians and nurses, the gap between the practicing profession and rapidly changing expectations for it, and the gap between nursing education and practice readiness—that is, what clinical nursing partners want graduating students to be able to do from Day 1.
He also discussed an “explosion” in the use of augmented and virtual reality, particularly as a result of the pandemic, and explained the virtual, mixed, augmented reality continuum in simulation.
O’Donnell’s lecture, along with the first lecture in the 2021 series, can be viewed in full at https://share.sonhs.miami.edu/education/share-lecture-series.
