Florida Hospital East Opens Simulation Center
Nov. 22--By late Friday morning, a group of medical students at Florida Hospital East Orlando had managed to bring a mannequin back to life several times.
With a few taps on an iPad, chief resident Dr. Paul Zipper had prompted this sophisticated machine simulating a real patient to go into cardiac arrest. Every time the students had jumped to revive him, anxiously waiting for the flatline on the monitor to turn into the spikes of a regular heartbeat as they administered CPR.
The $90,000 mannequin is part of the hospital's new simulation center, where doctors, nurses and students can learn new skills, refine their techniques, rehearse common scenarios and a few uncommon ones, like caring for an Ebola patient.
"We believe that introducing this will have benefits in multiple levels," said Dr. Patricio Bruno, director of medical education at Florida Hospital East Orlando. "We'll be able to provide better care. We'll be able to augment all the training of our residents and medical students since we're a teaching hospital. We'll be able to train our nurses, and we'll be able to do team training."
"We'll be able to deal with any clinical situation after having done different scenarios dozens and dozens of times," said Bruno, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, where simulation is an integral part of training.
In addition to this new simulation center at Florida Hospital, Orlando Health has the Center for Simulation-based Training and patient simulators in various campuses, UCF College of Medicine has a 7,500-square-foot Clinical Skills and Simulation Center, and the VA is building the National Simulation Center at its Lake Nona campus.
The trend is being repeated across the nation.
A growing body of evidence is showing that simulation training better prepares health-care providers for real-life situations. As a result, simulation centers are becoming more common in hospitals and medical schools. A handful of freestanding simulation centers around the nation open their doors to any professional who needs training.
"It's a wave," said Dr. Pamela Jeffries, president of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare and vice provost of digital initiatives at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
"The whole culture of safety and quality of care is coming to the forefront, so you're going to see more of them," said Jeffries, who was en route to Florida to deliver the keynote speech at the opening of a simulation center at Broward College on Friday.
Florida Hospital East's simulation center has three hospital simulation rooms with a central command center, from which instructors control the mannequins; a skills lab with various body parts; and a lecture hall for debriefing and reviewing videos that are recorded during training. The space used to be a pharmacy and cost more than $1 million to set up.
Dr. Miranda McGahan, a first-year family medicine resident, said she didn't have access to patient simulators during her medical education. "I think that's why I have such a big appreciation for it now. I didn't get to practice intubation as much as I would have liked, I didn't get to practice getting IV access. So the fact that these medical students have access to this is going to enhance their experience and get them really prepared for when they have to do it in the hospital."
Florida is in the 90th or 95th percentile when it comes to simulation training, said Nikki Campbell, assistant director of the Virtual Patient Care Center at USF Health Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation, which is one of the largest freestanding simulation centers in the country. "It's exciting to see more hospitals moving in that direction and considering simulation centers."
nmiller@tribune.com or 407-420-5158
Copyright 2014 - Orlando Sentinel
