The Sim Cafe~ Interview with David Halliwell

Dave Halliwell - Dave has dedicated his working life to making healthcare a better place, he works with amazing people in the innovative manikin company Lifecast body Simulation in the U.K.

Dave and his partners started lifecast Body Simulation in 2017. 

What many people may not realise is prior to Lifecast -  Dave and his business partner Rob Clark were both strategic healthcare commanders for some of the Olympic Games events in 2012. 

Being Military medics, paramedics, educators, university researchers and entrepreneurs their Simulation story is fascinating… 

Dave says “we probably crammed into our Simulation journey as much as we physically could, designing new concepts, taking on challenges as they came along. 

We’ve also kissed a few frogs in the Simulation industry as well! “

Dave is a keen fisherman and kayaker - as a young man he did an expedition to kayak the entire coast of Norway. 

Dave has 2 new grandchildren and enjoys his Grandpa time.

David's Cell +44 798 34  7903
Email:  Dave Halliwell@lifecastbodysim.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-halliwell-62b6242b/

Innovative SimSolutions.
Your turnkey solution provider for medical simulation programs, sim centers & faculty design.

Transcript

Disclaimer: 0:00

The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of anyone at Innovative Simsolutions or our sponsors.

ECHO Helathcare Ad: 0:13

This podcast is being sponsored by Echo Healthcare. EcoHealth Care is pleased to provide the world's most realistic training tools. Our life cast mannequins provide highly accurate and lifelike solutions that are offered in all ages from micro preemie all the way up to our seniors at 82 years old with multiple ethnicities to represent your patient population bundles. With our immersive interaction solution, your learners were fully engaged through sight, sound, smell, and touch. Already have some patient simulators that don't exactly depict the level of realism you'd like to portray. Allow Echo Healthcare to provide you with echo mask or second skin.

Intro: 0:59

Welcome to The Sim Cafe, a podcast produced by the team at Innovative Simsolutions, 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 cup of relaxation, sit back, tune in, and learn something new from The Sim Cafe.

Deb: 1:34

Welcome to another episode of The Sim Cafe. Today we are truly blessed to have David Halliwell join us. David, you're pretty well known, but why don't you go ahead and tell our guests a little bit more about you, And thank you so much for being a guest today. I'm very grateful

Dave: 1:52

Well thanks, Deb for the invite to talk to everybody today. Uh, I'm Dave Halliwell. I'm based over in the United Kingdom. I live on the South Coast, quite close to the beach. Um, and I have a, you know, very interesting life now. I guess in terms of my background. I started off as a military medic and then moved into paramedicine, then moved into resuscitation as a researcher and then on to starting my own business and, you know, and watching that grow. And so I think if it's okay, over the next half an hour or so, I'll, I'll give you some insight into how that stuff's gone. Um, I still see myself as an educator. I'm still registered as a paramedic here in the uk. Very proud of my, of my clinical background, even though I'm not practicing anymore. So, yeah, let's see how far we go.

Deb: 2:41

Thank you. And why don't you share your journey on how you actually got into simulation.

Dave: 2:48

Okay. So I think it probably all started really like most of your speakers with a, an interesting childhood, interesting school experience, uh, where again, like many of them, and I was just listening to Kevin King, speaking on here, didn't really understand education at school very well. It wasn't really for me. Um, and I made the decision at a very young age to move towards paramedicine. My father had a heart attack when he was 34, and I was 11 years of age. And I'll always remember that he said the guys that saved his life as far as he was concerned were the ambulance guys, because when he was having his his heart attack, they walked in with some oxygen and some gtn. And this is way back in the early seventies. And he felt that, you know, they were the, the real, you know, they were the real deal. And I guess I always emulated that. I was always fascinated by that. And so, uh, after my schooling, which was pretty rubbish, I decided to, Okay, look, you know, I wanna be a paramedic. Let's go off and let's see if I can do this ambulance thing. And so, uh, I, I started researching and around the age of 17, and here in the UK at the time, you had to be 21 and you had to have held your driving license for a few years and all of that stuff. And it was like, Well, what am I gonna do for four years? How am I gonna prepare myself if this is the career that I, I want to do? And so I went in the army and, uh, trained as a combat medic and did very well, I suppose in that world. I had some really fascinating postings and, and really learned my craft very, very well. Had some fantastic mentors in that really early stage of being a young man. And I would say that they taught me not only about sort of medicine, but they taught me about being a young man as well. You know, there was a lot of, a lot of, why are you doing that? You really could be a better person if you if you went in this direction. After a few years in the Army, I met my wife in the Fulton Islands. We made the decision that probably the best thing would be for me to give up my career in the military. She was still in the Navy at the time. And so I came back to the uk, applied for the ambulance service and started my ambulance career. And I worked my way through from a, being a care assistant to an ambulance, emt or technician as we would call them, here in the UK through to paramedic school. And then from paramedic school, again, having some fantastic mentors. And so I, I went to night school and I studied education qualified as a teacher, and then did that while still being on the road as a paramedic. And that was really where my love of education and started I suppose couple of years on, moved into the education department within the ambulance service and started really trying to understand more about, I guess more about where I fit within the paramedic education world. And at that time, again, we're, we're now talking sort of, nineties was still fairly new. We were still getting to grips with skills and drugs and all of those sort of things. And you know, one of the things that we'd started to do quite a lot of was small scale simulations. You know, how almost like task training, I suppose, rather than, than anything overly complex moving forward. I left the ambulance service, which had always been my dream, but I was offered an opportunity to go and work in a hospital as a resuscitation officer. And I was responsible for resuscitating everybody who had a cardiac arrest in the hospital. And it was really, really fascinating. My boss used to make me go to a postmortems every morning so that I could look at the damage that I'd caused, uh, to the patient from the night before. If you can imagine<laugh> the most amazing learning opportunity, Deb, phenomenal.

Deb: 6:47

It sounds counterintuitive, but walk me through what you would learn when you would go to that in the morning.

Dave: 6:54

So I would learn about rib fractures mostly, and that was the area that we were studying was how does a mechanical device compare with a, you know, with a human being and are we really making multiple fractures to the chest of these patients? And also it was great to get to see things, you know, you, you would teach people about pulmonary embolism or you teach people about deep vein thrombosis, but to go and actually see them being pulled out of, you know, people's hearts or out of people's legs, so you could actually physically get your hands on these things and realize how big they were was just amazing. And so I did the resuscitation thing for five years and I spent a lot of time in research and what we realized was that we were seeing a lot of unnecessary cardiac arrests. And so we started to focus on recognition of the thick patient. And this was back in 2000, uh, 2000, 2002. And we designed something called the Pool Early Warning System, Pew System, which has now become the patient early warning system and new system national early warning system. But it was really about teaching people how to recognize respiratory rate, increases blood pressure, dropping heart rate increases, and how we could get our nursing auxiliaries to do those skills. And so I, you know, my time in the hospital was the most humbling. And so I made the decision to go down the training route rather than the education route. And so I did a master's degree in training and it was probably one of the most interesting things in my mind was, you know, is there really a difference between training and education?

Deb: 8:30

Okay, yeah. I want you to, to go ahead and try and help myself as well as, uh, our learners understand what the differentiation is.

Dave: 8:37

I'm gonna ask you one question. So the question that I was asked, I had two teenage daughters at the time, and they said, Okay, Dave, your daughter comes home from school and she says, tomorrow, Dad, I've got a sex education class. How does that make you feel, Dave? And I'm like, Yeah, I'm okay with that. Of course, every child needs to be sex educated, okay, But what happens when she comes home and says to you, I've got sex training tomorrow, Dad,

Deb: 9:04

<laugh>,

Dave: 9:04

And what does that conjure in your brain? And if it conjures something different than you had in your brain when they were talking sex education, then you believe there was a difference between educational and training and absolutely as a father of two teenage daughters, there's a big difference when we, when we talk about those two things. So training is very much hands on, it's very practical, it's very much in my world preparing people for vocational skills. And I'm a advocate of training. Education is about the underpinning knowledge and the theories and all the other stuff. I get that, but that's not really what floats my boat at all. What I want to do is make people better at what they do every day. And so for me, undertaking a, you know, two years studying just training was, I'm absolutely fantastic. Absolutely the best thing I could have done if I go forward a little bit further in time. I left the hospital, went back to the ambulance service, but now I went back as the boss<laugh>, I went back as the head of education for a UK ambulance service, and I'm now responsible for their learning needs for about 3000 paramedic. And I had 26 trainers and 26 training schools and everything else to look after. And really, I spent a few years, I guess, learning how to be a boss of something quite large and putting all of those theories into practice and working with a, an amazing team of educators to develop education systems that would train 3000 people in a new skill every, you know, every couple of months. So we had to have something, you know, focusing on cascade training, really something that would work credly well to roll things out over significant numbers. And quite often that were, were quite high risk. And in 2007, around that time, we had something called the seven seven bombing here in London. We had a terrorist bombing on the same day. We rewarded the Olympic Games here in, in the uk And my role suddenly changed overnight towards preparing lots of people to be able to deal with terrorist incidents. And so as a, as a strategic commander, my role very much changed towards being able to manage these large scale incidents. And we started being trained every day,

Deb: 11:13

Great work, great work. And I do wanna thank you for articulating so well the difference between training and teaching<laugh>.

Dave: 11:24

You're gonna be there worrying about that all night now.

Deb: 11:27

Nicely done.

Dave: 11:28

It's a fascinating one. It's one of those big ones, but it's so important, It's so important. Training used to be a really dirty word. If I said to somebody I was a trainer, they'd look down their nose at me. But if I said I was an educator, oh, well you must be high brow. Do you know what? I'm gonna save more lives in my training than you are ever gonna save with your education. And that's a really, really important thing for, you know, for our community, especially the sim community, because we're all about that hands on stuff.

Deb: 11:55

Um, I'm gonna ask my next question, and that is, can you share with our learners your most favorite or impactful simulation story?

Dave: 12:04

Okay, I'm gonna choose a, a very strange one. In around about 2016, 2017, I was asked to go to part of Lebanon and I was asked to run a simulation for six people. And it seems very, very straightforward when you think, oh, you're just running a mass casualty command<inaudible> situation, all you're really focusing on the six people around the table. And so I, I flew out to Lebanon with a, a friend of mine called Stuart. So we get down there, uh, we meet with the head of the fire brigades and we go and look at what resources he has. We go and meet with the head of the Red Cross, and we spent a couple of days looking at the local geography, um, to understand. And all the time I was really chatting to the players about where they lived and what businesses they did and all of that sort of stuff. And then I went to meet a group, uh, seen by the outside world as a terrorist organization and their terrorist commander, uh, he's responsible for healthcare for his particular religion, in this case the Sunnis. And then the following day I was to meet another terrorist commander. And what I learned was these guys were not really terrorists at all. It's, that's how they're viewed by the outside world, but in their country they deliver healthcare the same as we do. And I had to unplug my head from that particular piece of brainwashing that I'd had previously. But the interesting thing was all of these guys were sitting around the table and they were gonna be the main players for my simulation. And so what we decided to do was we built them as a simulation where we made buildings collapse. We basically, we gave them an earthquake and we made buildings collapse, but the buildings that we made collapse, we found videos of actual earthquake buildings falling to the ground. And we'd spent our time learning the geography of the area so that I knew that the buildings that I would make collapse were the buildings that were built during the war in Lebanon and were built without planning permission. And so therefore they were the logical buildings to fall to the ground, if that makes any sense. We then looked at, uh, if those fell to the ground, what impact would that have on the hospital when actually they were on the road to the hospital? So that was even better. It would, it would stop things going to the hospital. We, as part of the earthquake, obviously we had a few issues in terms of the first couple of hundred patients flooded the hospital caused them a few issues. And the scenario carries on a little bit further. We get to a point where petrol station catches fire, and again, we use video footage of that happening. And then there's a part of the scenario where the smoke from the petrol station will either go from the sea to the mountains, in which case it's, it's not gonna do a huge amount of damage. There is a part of the scenario that I did, and we make the tide disappear. So there's a tsunami coming and we give them about an hour. So it gives them enough time that they can start to think about what they're gonna do. And so we make the tide disappear, we get the Met office in, we get the seismic people in, we get all these, We also have media there doing interviews with them whilst they're trying to still do their job and putting'em on all those extra bits suppression that nobody really likes when they're, they're being related. And I chose for one of the players who happened to be, and I'll say happened to be, but this isn't really the case, but happened to be one of the terrorist commanders. I chose to get his daughter to give him a ring during the scenario and say, Daddy, I'm on the beach. And I chose to personalize the sim to one individual because as far as I'd been brainwashed, that guy wasn't a good guy,<laugh>. And I wanted to sort of, you know, focus everyone's attention that this is real, this can really happen to you and what's gonna happen if your daughter's there on the beach and the tide's gone out. So she phones up her dad and says, Daddy, I've got, I've got some fish for tea. And he's in this thing where he knows that there's a tsunami coming and he knows he can't get to his daughter and all his other anxieties are coming on. And that's why I say to you, why was it the most impactful? Because it's the only time in my career that I've been that much of an, only time where I've deliberately gone outta my way to hurt somebody using simulation. And I feel bad about it every single day. And so the reason that I wanted to share it with you and with the podcast is cause I'm not proud of what I did that day because it's not who I am. But in terms of the impact that it had for me personally, it was hugely impact. You know, I'm five or six years on and I still worry about that guy every day. Was it the right thing to do? Was it right to personalize something so dramatically for somebody? Because if that was done to me, I'd probably be having nightmares about it for, you know, I'd been brainwashed, I'd been brainwashed at these guys, this particular group were bad people and, and it just shows I could be a real if I wanted to be. And I think that was why it was so impactful for me personally. So let's roll forwards. Okay. You know, back to being Dave, a nice guy. And then I get a message that there's been an explosion in Beirut. And if you remember this, it was the fertilizer explosion in Beirut and it took out most of Beirut's City. Um, it happened about two years after we did the training and uh, a friend of mine phone me up and he said, David, thank you for the training that you gave us. He said, because we had, when we were in that scenario, we thought, it's okay. We've been here before. I've done this before, I've done this with Mr. David, he's put us through this. The fire chief lost 13 of his staff in the first few seconds of that explosion. Can you imagine that? No, I mean, that's the thing. But because I'd done that to them in, in the sim and I'd personalized it all in the sim, they were actually able to cope with it in the, you know, in the real world. And I'm very, very proud of that one. And so this whole thing about, you know, you talked to me about what's your highlight? It, it's a highlight for many reasons, because the long term effect of what we did down there. Fantastic. You know, Lebanon owners is a, a very well resourced, very well trained team for their mass casual and major instrument stuff now. And at the time they really weren't doing that well. So, you know, incredibly proud of that side of it.

Deb: 18:33

I'm grateful for your ability to be vulnerable and share that story. Um, can you share with our, our listeners what you did during the Covid Pandemic in any lessons that were learned?

Dave: 18:45

Yeah, Co covid was fascinating for us. By the time that we reached Covid, we'd started the life cast body simulation company. We had our other company. And so here in the uk, when we heard about the first few patients coming in with Covid, we had already done a lot of work preparing other parts of the world, especially the Middle East, to be able to cope with SARS and mers and mass casualty events. So we were, we were quite well positioned in terms of our knowledge and our skills to be able to provide support to the National Health Service here in the uk, you know, with our knowledge and our thinking and some of the kit that we'd used in the past. So one of the first things that we did was we gave out every single mannequin that we had to the mass casualty hospitals prone. Uh, we designed our mannequins with a quite good back. So actually they were very good for ventilating in a prone position, and they were sort of the only mannequins that were designed to be resuscitated face down. Uh, we then went round supporting a lot of the rollout of the stuff during the, you know, the early days of Covid. We were very lucky, we carried on traveling during Covid. So we carried on going into hospitals, providing support. So for us, the Covid thing really was almost situation normal with the exception of the lack of conferences and, and obviously manufacturing. But, you know, we were very fortunate, Kevin King and and his team at Echo Healthcare were able to pick up some of the manufacturing over in the USA for us. And so we were still able to produce enough conferences moved to being delivered from my garden here. Um, and so I was doing literally zoom conferences from, from my back garden, which was fantastic. Uh, it, it sort of become quite normal for us, I guess, and the covid time, one of reflection and really an opportunity for us to think about where we were and what we were doing, I suppose as much as anything else.

Deb: 20:38

Thank you. Can you share with our listeners the biggest thing that you'd like them to know? Something that when you learned it, it changed the way you practice?

Dave: 20:46

Oh, there's so many, there's so many that I'd love to share. I mean, that's really why I did my blogging on LinkedIn these days. And, you know, sharing the mind map and trying to simplify, I suppose the whole world of simulation. I think my, probably my biggest aha moment is the one that I've already shared, which is the, you know, we have a, a drawing and, and it's got be a dick, don't be a dick. And it's sort of two, two buttons and you can choose to push the button or you can choose the, the don't be a dick button. And I, I think it's really important for us to, you know, to take that time to think, I don't need to push that particular button. I can do this another way. And I think, you know, there's lots of reasons why we end up pushing the wrong button and you know, you just have to unpick that within yourself. I think the world of simulation is changing so much now. I started off, as I say, I started off my simulation journey in the seventies and so, you know, this is almost, uh, 40 years of simulation stuff now. And you know, I've seen huge changes in that time and, and I think we're still really in the infancy of where we can go. I think the technology versus realism debate, I think is one that we need people to understand that fidelity is subjective. High technology does not equate to high realism in any way, shape or form. There's a lot of those things I think that we just need to unpick with people. Uh, and it's finally an opportunity much like this, much as the, as the podcast does, to be able to say to people, Okay, you know, what you might think is high fidelity, I might think is just clever technology. And it's having that debate with people to say, you know, a mannequin who, whose eyes blinked, actually the noise of those eyes blinking drives me insane<laugh>. And I would find that as a distraction. And it's, it's being able to have those conversations with people. You know, I'm a really big fan of the moment of the wearables and we copy people and turn them into mannequins. That's what we do. And we try and save lives by speaking for people who can't speak for themselves. And, um, you know, that's what I was put on this planet to be able to do was to say, Okay, well actually, I, I won't tell people about your story. There's a little girl here in the UK called Gwen, and she's seven years of age now and she's got Down syndrome and we 3D scan Gwen and we're making a Gwen Mannequin in her lifetime. Gwen's had over 30 respiratory arrests, you know, she stopped breathing it more than 30 times. She's had over 30 different surgeries to lengthen and tighten parts of her body to enable her to walk. She's covered in scars all over. And this little girl with Downs, you know, I I'm so passionate about the Downs mannequin because why haven't we got them? I'm a paramedic. I've trained 3000 paramedics every year for, you know, for years and years and years. And I couldn't teach'em about Downs cuz there wasn't a mannequin for that. That's not right. And so I wanna be able to tell Gwen's story, working with her parents and working with the Downs Association, loads of other people that I'm working with now, but I wanna be able to tell Gwen's story to other people and say, Is it right that this little girl has to have all this and none of us know anything about Dows to that extent? No, we should all be trained in that stuff. When the age of viability dropped to 22 weeks, you know, there were no mannequins on the planet to enable us to resuscitate a 22 week old baby. And so we made some, and we made some really quickly because again, there was a whole population of tiny little people nobody was able to train on. Nobody was able to speak up for them, nobody was able to show people what, what that stuff was about. And, and that's the role that we've taken on is to say, okay, yeah, we want to be able to represent the downs appropriately within the mannequin space and we want to be able to talk about the micro preemies, the 500 grand pries and how we resu to take them and how they're different than the one pound baby. How does that differ in, in terms of weight and in terms of thinking and everything else that we do. And, uh, you know, it's, it's a great privilege, if I'm honest, to be doing what I'm doing. I like copying people and turning'em into mannequins. I see it as, as probably the, the most privileged thing I could ever do with my life. I can tell other people's stories. We make old people mannequins, as you know, and the old lady, the Vivian Vivian Brison, you know, 84 years of age, she's jumping out of an airplane on an 80th birthday,<laugh>, you know, to be filmed for a car company. She's an actress, she's a dancer, she's a trained psychologist, she's an empress in Star Wars, she's worked with Brad Pit, I mean God. And she's one of our mannequins. Like, wow, wow. That's the world that I have it now. And, and I'm, you know, I would say I'm very lucky. Very, very lucky.

Deb: 25:37

Truly blessed. Yeah. Yeah,

Dave: 25:39

I think so.

Deb: 25:41

Now, is there anything you wanna ask me?

Dave: 25:44

I like awkward questions as you've probably gathered, so I've got one for you. And it's, um, it's one that I was asked, so I, I thought I'd flip it around and say if there was one piece of advice that you would give to the teenage you, Deb, what would it be?

Deb: 26:01

That's an interesting question. And I think that I would give the teenage me the opportunity to learn about my feelings and not just dismiss them to learn what the different feelings are. What is joy, what is sadness, what is grief, what is anger? And to feel through them and to learn how to process them. Because by the time I got to the emergency department and was working there, it was too late. And I think it's important to know how you're feeling and I look at, you know, now when I recognize I'm feeling gratitude, I'm feeling calm, I'm feeling anxious, why is this? And to learn how to breathe through it, it, and release it in, in healthy ways. That's what I think I would teach someone or want them to know. If you find a mentor, someone who can help you to, to go through those times, go with those people who are good influences. Like you said, the, if you run into groups of people that are not so kind, but maybe they're in the fast lane geared towards the people that you feel comfortable around, that you feel part of their group and not that you have to feel like you have to do what they're doing to fit in. Does that make sense?

Dave: 27:18

Yeah, totally. Totally. I think, I think I said at the beginning, you know, when I was in my teens, you know, my later teens in the army, there was a guy there who took me under, under his wing and said, Stop it, just stop what you're doing. Think for a second, you know, you're a clever guy, but if you carry on on the path you're on, it's not gonna be a very nice world for you. And he literally straightened me out with just a couple of days of exactly what you spoke about. You know, why are you angry, what are you angry about? Why are you here in the army, what are you doing? And just asking me those really difficult questions that, you know, nobody'd ever asked me before, why I was angry, what was I angry about? Why did I wanna do certain things? But now I understand what it was all about. But in 55 now, like taken me a long time to work it out.

Deb: 28:06

Right, I agree, I agree. Now, if our listeners wanna get a hold of you, um, if they have questions for you, if they wanna know about your company or products, what would they do next?

Dave: 28:16

Yeah, I mean they can get me on cell. So plus 4, 4 7 9 8 3 4 3 7 9 0 3 or at my email address, Dave Halliwell or one word at life cast body sim.com and that one would always get through to me, or better still just look me up on LinkedIn. I've got about, I think about 25,000 people that I talk to most days on LinkedIn now. And you know, if people drop me a message on LinkedIn, I'll normally answer that actually before I'll answer emails these days because you get so many emails. But I normally, I only get one or two sort of LinkedIn questions a day. So, uh, yeah, you know, please try and follow the journey on LinkedIn. That's where I'm gonna be posting certainly for the next, I think it's about 200 days or I try and make sense of that mind map, be posting all of the ideas around how did we end up, you know, designing that map and where did that really go? And we've got another one following up on that, which is all about the mass casualty stuff and how we, uh, you know, how, how we designed some of those things to be able to cope with 200,000 patients a day or whatever it was that we we wanted to create.

Deb: 29:25

Well, thank you for this interview. It's just been a pleasure to learn your story and I appreciate you sharing in your time.

Dave: 29:33

Thank you, Deb.

Deb: 29:35

Happy Simulating

ECHO Healthcare tag: 29:37

Echo Healthcare provides the world's most realistic training tools with their life cast mannequins or echo mask and second skin accessories that create life-like simulators for your learners. Connect with them today.

Outro: 29:55

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.