The Sim Cafe` An Interview with Dr. Suzan Kardong-Edgren

Thank you Suzan Kardong-Edgren for sharing your leadership principles with me today. Always assume goodwill. This episode to air during Healthcare Simulation Week!
From Kouzes/Posner Jim Kouzes Barry Posner
The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership
1) Model the Way
2) Inspire a Shared Vision
3) Challenge the Process
4) Enable Others to Act
5) Encourage the Heart
Suzie shares her experience and thoughts about leadership and simulation.
#leadership #technology #thankyou
SimGHOSTS - The Gathering of Healthcare Simulation Technology Specialists - The Mavericks of Simulation Ferooz Sekandarpoor Society for Simulation in Healthcare (SSH) ASPiH S.International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning

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Transcript

ECHO Healthcare: 0:00

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Intro: 0:46

Welcome to The Sim Cafe, a podcast produced by the team at Innovative Simssolutions, edited by Shelly Houser. Join our host Deb Tauber, as she sits down with subject matter experts from across the globe to reimagine clinical education and the use of simulation. So pour yourself a cupof relaxation, sit back, tune in and learn something new from The Sim Cafe.

Deb: 1:19

Welcome to another episode of The Sim Cafe today. We're blessed once again to have Suzie with us, and we're gonna start out simulation healthcare week with some of these interviews with some special guests. So Suzie, why don't you tell us a little bit about your thoughts about why we celebrate simulation healthcare week and, uh, some of the things you've done to celebrate.

Suzie: 1:40

Great. I was lucky enough to be at a school Robert Morris University, as the Director of Sim there to be able to celebrate it at least two years. Uh, I think we did it at least two years, three years in a row. And we became a really great way. Think about where it's positioned in September the start of a semester. And students have heard, you know, who knows what about going into the sim center? So the opportunity to have people come in, you know, have some cake look around, see us at our friendliest best, not in a stressful situation and letting people come in, really look at our equipment, see it in a, not teaching light, but in a less stressful experience has been a wonderful thing for us and was really look forward to every year. I think every year we did it a little better at our place, and I think we just had a great time doing it. And I think that it helps us think about the use of sim and what sim has done for us and allows all kinds of people to come in and see a sim center that might not see it in a normal situation and see us in any way that maybe doesn't look serious, although we all work and it know how serious it really is.

Deb: 2:52

No, I think you're spot on with that. I remember we weren't celebrating healthcare simulation week at the time, cuz this was probably 2010, but we had a group of hospital administrators come in and they got to watch sim from behind the glass Uhhuh and they were just fascinated by it. So I think anything that we can do to once again celebrate the things that we're doing in expose people to how valuable it is and what it really is and what it's really not. Cause I think people just don't until you've been in the environment, you can't conceptualize it.

Suzie: 3:28

Exactly. I, I agree with that.

Deb: 3:31

Another question I wanted to ask you is this year in NASCIL really seem to take a change in turn for the better. And, and I'd like you to share some of your leadership pearls with us. And, and what are some of the things that you celebrated and why do you think that was?

Suzie: 3:52

Well, I had the wonderful experience of being asked to be the mentor for somebody who was going through the Sigma Theta PHI faculty leader academy. The last one that they did. And the great thing about being the mentor is that you get to go to it also and, uh, learn a lot of leadership things. And I was introduced to the COOs in Posner, the leadership challenge and their five practices, which I happen to have taped in front of me every day, all day. So when I decided to run for the leadership of an axle, I really couched everything I did in terms of these five practices. And they are model the way inspire a shared vision challenge. The process enable others to act and encourage the heart. Now this might seem like common sense, but when things are getting tough, if you really hold onto those five principles and something that I learned again, gratefully at the center for medical simulation, one of the things they always talk about is assume Goodwill. Even when things look like they might not be Goodwill, it is just kind of guided what we did as we went through. Some changes in, in, uh, our management company changes in of course new people coming on board is, uh, as far as a company goes to help us at a time when we were gonna have to, uh, shut down our conference where we are gonna be able to go to virtual conference in the middle of COVID. So you talk about multiple things happening at the same time, it could have been really stressful, but it really wasn't. We had a great team on board at, at the, uh, board. At that time, we put together a team to look at the different management companies that were out there. We made a leap of faith. I think that the company that we went with Smith Bucklin made a leap of faith with us because we had a lot of challenges at that particular point with, uh, people that did not want to let us out of hotel reservations and things like that when we were not gonna have a face to face conference, lots of things happening, and it all worked out, it all did. It did so, uh, and I think that being guided by a, for real theory, if you will, if you, we talk theory and research all the time, and we say that we should catch everything we do in terms of those kinds of things, having a leadership theory to fall back on, put my money where my mouth is and let's try this out. It worked. So, uh, I was lucky and again, it was a God thing it worked out was good.

Deb: 6:39

Thank you. Thank you very much. And I think you said you made a statement about, so you belong to a NASCIL you belong to the society. You're part of SimGHOSTS. I think the systems integration is what we need to think about how we can all share to help raise the bar, especially to celebrate this during simulation healthcare week.

Suzie: 7:01

Absolutely, absolutely. Each one of those organizations, um, has a role to play and I'm gonna throw ASPE in there also ASPE I love that we are all meeting together quarterly and talking about having pre-con at each o ther's major conferences and things like that, so that we provide value added for our, uh, attendees at whatever we're attending. And I think there'll be some more cross pollination that we hadn't planned on because we a re a t each other's, uh, conferences and such. So I think there's never been a better time to be in simulation.

Deb: 7:35

I, I would agree. Thank you, honestly. I appreciate all you've done. And your ability to, once again, work with systems integration, I loved how you described the SimGHOSTS as the Mavericks

Suzie: 7:49

<laugh> they are the Mavericks. You never know what you're gonna see there, and they can pull things off. I don't know if people at NASCIL would necessarily appreciate, but I think it's great. Um, they interviewed a, a mannequin and the facilitator, uh, at this last, uh, opening conference, the opening, uh, gambit, shall we say? And it was pretty funny. I try to imagine that in an axle and I, I can't, I don't know if that would be a thing. It says H perhaps, but I think those other two organizations maybe are, uh, maybe full of more perhaps serious people. Um, and again, that Maverick, uh, flavor comes through with SimGHOSTS.

Deb: 8:32

Excellent. Excellent. I will have to get somebody from ASPE to, uh, interview at some point. So maybe you have some suggestions or if any listener hears that and wants to reach out. That would be fantastic.

Suzie: 8:45

Super.

Deb: 8:45

I'm gonna ask my final question. So Suzie, if you wanted to tell our learners one thing that you learned in all of your learning, like your one Pearl, so that they don't have to learn it themselves, what, what do you think that would be?

Suzie: 9:01

Um, I actually learned it during being a clinical instructor for seven years, and then starting into simulation in a, in a simulation center that had glass so that people couldn't see my reactions to what they were doing and what I had not realized. And I had been teaching clinical for a number of years, like seven to 10 years at that point that when people have really good verbal skills, I tended to believe that they're probably pretty good at what they do. And I, I had had that confirmed. So I had confirmatory bias as far as this goes. And when I saw somebody who I thought was probably pretty stellar in a simulation, I was on the other side of the glass and I saw them basically do absolutely everything wrong, talking away the whole time. Like she knew what she, and it was a, she knew, uh, like she knew what she was talking about. I was up against the glass looking and I thought, I wonder how often this happens, that somebody who's really good verbally has bamboozled me and that I was persuaded that they really were good. And of course the person who is more quiet or more introverted than in a clinical group, they don't usually talk that much. And I might assume maybe they're not as strong. And when I see them running through a sim, a lot of times they're pretty good. So I think the thing that, and I learned early on in SIM was that was that particular thing is that I was very persuaded by people's verbal abilities. And that, that does not necessarily carry over into actions and ability to apply knowledge. So if I had one word of wisdom for anybody, and the thing that again, I will take it to my grave is that you can be fooled by people's verbal skills. And if I may say, I think that explains a lot of politicians. And I, I love saying that because I think we see it, but we don't realize we're seeing it until we get to know people better.

Deb: 10:56

No, I would very much agree. And how did you handle that situation with the learner?

Suzie: 11:03

It wasn't like I could run in and say,<laugh> what are you doing? Because I'd never seen it before. So we had a really robust debriefing and she learned a lot. I learned a lot and we really did. We used all of those things, we know, assume Goodwill. Uh, I was probably trying to do advocacy inquiry then before I knew what it was, because I didn't really know why she was doing what she was doing. Although she was talking away to the patient, I could not understand why she was doing what she was doing. So we, we started, uh, really having robust debriefings as far as that goes. And I learned a lot about debriefing, seeing things like that.

Deb: 11:44

Right. I, and I really feel that using simulation for clinical hires would be a really important thing to do. Because once again, verbally in interview, you can communicate with somebody that you can do all these things. But once again, as you stated bamboozled,

Suzie: 12:05

Are you saying this about the clinical educator?

Deb: 12:07

I'm saying this about hiring somebody into a position, like say emergency medicine?

Suzie: 12:12

Yes. Yes. Oh yes. And so I will say that, uh, one of the things I like is to have some standardized students and put people through their paces with standardized students, we've done this at, uh, the at conference at several times, basically talking about, uh, preparing clinical educators for those things that students will do, like completely be incorrect or threatening the instructor, or, uh, coming on to the instructor or all of those different kinds of things that you don't really know are, are gonna happen, or that could happen. And how do you handle that? And it always creates a robust discussion with everybody who's in the room because we do it in front of everybody using basically the tag team approach from Australia. So that it's basically theater of in a theater in the round kind of thing. So that everybody's around, it can jump in and say what they wanna say, but it's really a helpful thing to do because a lot of people come into clinical education and really have no idea what they've gotten themselves into, especially with students and how they are, uh, perhaps more challenging than they have been in the past.

Deb: 13:25

Right. I actually had an opportunity to present on the use of simulation for incivility recognition and response, because I think that that's another area. Yep.

Suzie: 13:37

Great use of simulation.

Deb: 13:40

Cause it's so insidious. You don't realize it's happening. Yes<laugh>. Yeah. All right. Well, this has been a wonderful time to have an opportunity to speak with you once again. And do you have anything else that you wanna leave our listeners with today?

Suzie: 13:54

Really nothing more than happy simulation week.

Deb: 13:58

Thank you. Happy simulation week to you. And we will keep in touch.

Suzie: 14:02

Okay.

ECHO TAG: 14:04

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Outro: 14:22

Thanks for joining us here at The Sim Cafe. We hope you enjoyed connect with us at www.innovativesimsolutions.com and be sure to hit that like and subscribe button. So you never miss an episode of the SIM Cafe.