The History of Simulation Certification and Inception of the Healthcare Simulation Dictionary with Dr. Joseph Lopreiato

Dr. Joseph O. Lopreiato 
Undergraduate: B.S. (Biology) Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey, 1973-1977.
Medical: M.D. Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, D.C., 1977-1981.
Masters Degree: Masters of Public Health, University of Texas Health Science Center School of Public Health, 1995-1997.
Internship: Pediatrics, National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland, 1981-1982.
Residency: Pediatrics, National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland, 1982-1984.
Fellowships: Primary Care Faculty Development Fellowship, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 1993-1994.
Academic Pediatrics Fellowship, University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, Texas 1995-1997.
Certificate: Healthcare Modeling and Simulation. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA. September 2013.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Joseph O. Lopreiato MD, MPH received his MD degree from Georgetown University in 1981 and his MPH degree from the University of Texas. He completed his pediatric internship and residency at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, MD in 1984 and did fellowships in faculty development and academic pediatrics at Michigan State University and The University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio where he earned an MPH degree. He subsequently completed a 31 year career in the United States Navy Medical Corps as a pediatrician and educator. He has held several education leadership positions including pediatric clerkship director, director for educational affairs, and pediatric residency program director. He is the recipient of several national awards for education including the Academic Pediatric Association’s Ray Helfer Award for Innovation Medical Education, The American Academy of Pediatrics National Education Award, a finalist for the ACGME Parker J. Palmer Award, and the recipient of the Association of Pediatric Program Director’s Walter Tunneson Award for extraordinary or innovative contributions in pediatric graduate medical education. He has conducted consultations for pediatric training programs for the Association of Pediatric Program Directors and is a case developer for the National Board of Medical Examiners Step II clinical skills examination.
He is currently the Associate Dean for Simulation Education and Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine and Nursing at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD. He is also the medical director of the Val G. Hemming Simulation Center, a multidisciplinary learning laboratory serving students across the continuum of medicine. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, a member of the American Pediatric Society, the Association of Standardized Patient Educators and is the President of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare. He is certified as a Healthcare Simulation Educator by the Society.

REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS, PROJECTS, AND/OR DEPLOYMENTS

Associate Dean for Simulation Education and Medical Director, Val G. Hemming Simulation Center, 2003-present

Professor of Pediatrics, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, May 2011.

William P. Clements Award as Outstanding Military Educator, USUHS, 1992.

Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society, USUHS, 1992.

Captain, Medical Corps, US Navy 1999-2008

Department of Defense Superior Service Medal, 2008

President, Society for Simulation in Healthcare, 2018-2019

Member, National Board of Medical Examiners Test Reliability (IRC) committee for Step II CS exam. 2016-present.

Chair, Executive committee, Uniformed Services Section, American Academy of Pediatrics, 2001-2005.

John M. Eisenberg Award for Innovation in Patient Safety and Quality, the

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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 Sim Solutions or our sponsors.

Intro: 0:13

Welcome to the Sim Cafe, a podcast produced by the team at Innovative Sim Solutions, edited by Shelly Houser. Join our host, Deb Tauber and co-host Jarrod Jeffries as they sit 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: 0:54

Welcome to another episode of The Sim Cafe. I'm Deb Tauber, your host here with my co-host Jarrod Jeffries. And today we have Dr. Joe Lopreiato and Dr. Lopreiato. Would you like me to call you Dr. Lopreiato or Joe?

Dr.Joe: 1:09

Joe is fine.

Deb: 1:10

So Dr. Joe received his MD degree from Georgetown University in 1981 in his MPH from the University of Texas. He completed his pediatric internship and residency at the National Naval Medical Center in Vasa in 1984. He did fellowships in faculty development and academic pediatrics at Michigan State University and the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, where he earned an MPH degree. Why don't you go ahead and share a little bit more about yourself, Dr. Joe, so that our listeners can get a better understanding instead of just hearing me read something. And thank you again so much for being on The Sim Cafe with us today.

Dr.Joe: 1:54

You're most welcome and thanks for the invitation. So, uh, I am a native of New Jersey. Grew up there, uh, the son of an immigrant. My father was an immigrant from Italy. My mom was born here. And early on I took an interest in science and decided to become a pre-med. I attended Seaton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. From there, I gained acceptance to Georgetown University School of Medicine, where it began my MD studies. At the same time, in order to pay for medical school, I decided to take a scholarship from the United States Navy so that upon graduation I would be commissioned as a lieutenant in the Medical Corps of the United States Navy. And that's what happened after graduation. And then I did my training in pediatrics at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, with those people who know where that is. It's across the street from the n I h in the United States near Washington, DC Finished that training after three years. They went on to become a general pediatrician and medical educator in the Navy for 30 years. Retired from active duty in, uh, 2008, but retired doesn't mean stop working. I, uh, continued on as a federal, a US government federal physician, pediatrician medical educator at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, which is a military, medical and nursing school outside Washington dc. And from there, one of my last assignments on active duty and my first assignment as a federal physician was the medical director of the Val G. Hemming Simulation Center here in, uh, in Silver Spring, Maryland. Not far from the Bethesda campus of our university. And we are the simulation center for our medical students and our graduate nursing students. And that's what I've been doing ever since.

Deb: 3:29

Thank you very much for your service. And why don't you share with our listeners how you actually got into simulation?

Dr.Joe: 3:38

It was because of a need. I need to do a, uh, a project as part of my NPH degree back in the middle nineties. And at the time, I was exploring the use of unannounced standardized or unannounced simulated patients and how they could be used to gather data on trainees performance. So at the time I was doing my mph, h I was in an academic pediatric fellowship whereby we learn how to be a medical educator. So we go to school to be a medical educator, work with PhDs and MDs about how to teach, how to design curriculum, uh, how to design curricula, how to employ accurate and reliable invalid assessment tools. So I went to school to be an educator for about two years. And during that time, I conceived of an education project whereby I had devised a new curricula for pediatric residents. And I wanted to test whether the curriculum was working in the real world. So it's one thing to have a curricula and put people put learners through it, but how do they perform in the real world once they finish the curriculum, uh, or the curriculum? Were they any better than before? So I did a pre-post study of pediatric residents in a large residency program where I recruited and trained mothers and their children from the community to come in and, uh, make appointments with our residents. Unbeknownst to them, they were, uh, these, uh, mothers and they were working for me in that they would go through the entire visit and at the end of the entire visit would report back to me what exactly happened in that visit. And I used that paradigm to see whether or not the curriculum we instituted in well childcare, which is a staple of pediatric practice, whether that curriculum really worked by, uh, doing a pre-post. So I learned about simulated standardized patients and how to train them to be not only patients, but also how to train them to be assessors and provide data back to me. Um, and the field of unannounced standardized patients is still exists. It's employed in a few places in graduate medical education, people call them secret shoppers, right? It's a form of, uh, simulation in which the person who is, uh, the learner, for example, may not know that they are a simulated patient. They think they're a real patient, but in fact they're collecting data for the investigator. So that's how I got started in sim on the standardized patient human side. And then when I became the director of this sim center, had to learn a lot about mannequin simulation and learn a lot about the, the techniques in, in that field. And then from there branched out to dabbling a little bit in virtual reality, augmented reality. So that now at our center and in my expertise, I have some experience in all those areas. Human simulation, mannequin simulation, task trainers, and then screen-based simulation. So I got a chance over my career to learn a little bit about and get experience in those forms of simulation.

Jerrod: 6:18

Certainly a vast experience.<laugh>. Yeah. Thank, thanks for that. So from the Navy to secret shoppers to pediatrics VR and kind of the future and the innovation, do you have a favorite simulation story that you have that you've experienced?

Dr.Joe: 6:33

My favorite simulation story is because I love being an educator and I love listening and watching learners. I think that's my passion, is just watching the light go on, watching them have insight into what they're doing is I, uh, run an instructor course where I go to places and I watch, you know, the debriefing. And then we go through some elements of debriefing, mostly on the mannequin side. We go through levels of debriefing, but I've also done it on the human patient side. I watch faculty do the debriefing or the feedback session, and I love coaching them and giving them some advice, seeing if they can incorporate it. So my favorite story is when I do this instructor course, I go to a place, I see what, how the debriefing goes. We go through some instructor training about a half day, where we go through, you know, writing goals and objectives, writing scenarios, creating or adapting assessment tools. And then we actually go into two or three simulations where the instructor gets to practice these new skills that they just learned. And my most satisfying moment is see how as instructors go from station to station, the first time they, they sort of do okay, then they do a little bit better, then they do a little bit better. And by the last station they are great. And I'm excited because they have learned a new skill right there and they, it looks like, and they've been able to demonstrate through simulation that they can do that skill. To me, that just, uh, makes my day.

Jerrod: 7:52

And, and are there any wild debriefing when you're doing these coaching sessions? Are there any specific patterns that you usually see when this happens that could help any of our listeners?

Dr.Joe: 8:01

The most common pattern I see is the instructor talks too much.<laugh> the facility that talks too much. It's all about asking the right questions is what we preach. And letting the learners self-aware, the self-regulate, self-aware, the learners come to a realization of their gaps and what they need to do to approve rather than the instructor doing all the talking. So the most common mistake I see in debriefing is the instructor or their facilitator says, well, you should have done this and you should have done that and you should have done this and you should have done that. And there's really not a lot of questioning, like, I saw that you did this, or Why did you do that? You know, the advocacy inquiry model, or you could use the plus delta model. But somehow asking more questions is what I eventually find is they get to after being coached and instructed him. But brand new facilitators often fall into the idea of, I'm, I'm an instructor here, I'm the sage on the stage. Right. Rather than the guide on the side as they say.

Deb: 8:54

<laugh>. Yeah, I like that. I like that stage

Jerrod: 8:57

On the stage. Yeah, that's cool.

Dr.Joe: 8:59

I didn't invent that. I still, that's, that's a well-known phrase. The don't be this in medical education, don't be the sage on the stage, the center of attention, be the guide on the side, the facilitator, which is why I think now we call them facilitators rather than, you know, instructors or debriefers. We're trying to get across the idea that you're there to, to be curious, right. To ask questions as Jenny Rudolph would say, to investigate frames or frame of mine or people in.

Deb: 9:25

Absolutely. So thank you so much for that. And I also wanna, I had the honor of meeting you at an IMSH conference when you were the president and I remember just feeling so comfortable and being around your presence when I thought, oh my gosh, this man has done so much. So the work with the dictionary. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your history with the society?

Dr.Joe: 9:49

Sure. When I joined the society, I went to a, a session, a workshop on should we develop a certification program for simulation educators. And I sat in the last row in the back, you know, planning to leave right away. And the more they talked, the more I got interested in the idea of, oh, that's an interesting thought, that simulation is advanced enough that we now have principals and practices and we have a research base that perhaps we now ought to send people to school. Uh, in this case, learning about the principals and practices on your own, taking an exam, which sounds terrifying to a lot of people, but taking an exam at least to see if you had the knowledge to be a simulation educator. It's, I was fascinated by the idea I stayed in for the entire program. Uh, Lisa Sins, who eventually was a president, became the president of society, uh, society for Simulation and Healthcare was in the room. And I went up and asked her a couple of questions, and I guess because she thought I was interested, she said to me, do you wanna come to a meeting in London to talk about certification with the rest of our group? And I said, London, don't ask twice., I'm there. So we went to London and I sat in, in that committee where we talked about the idea of how to get a certification program started. And at the end of that meeting, Lisa said to me, I want you to chair the certification committee. What do I know about certification? I was just listening. I was just around, I was here to see London<laugh>

Jerrod: 11:08

And what year is this?

Dr.Joe: 11:08

U h, this is probably, uh, 2 008 or nine something in that neighborhood there. Wow. And u m, I said, okay, c uz I, I have a trouble saying no. So I said, okay. And I didn't know what I was getting myself into, but from there we reinvigorated the certification committee and then eventually after a few years of really hard work f or a whole lot of people and under the leadership of Andrew Spain, who was one of the, uh, staff of the society and a s a superstar, we were able to launch our certification program a few y ears later. And I just got the latest, uh, data. W e have something l ike over, uh, 4,000 certified simulation educators in dozens and dozens of countries around the world, which really makes i t me feel proud that I was,

Jerrod: 11:49

And hopefully one in London as well. So yeah,

Dr.Joe: 11:51

We definitely need to go back to London, but so proud of what that committee has done and the continuing work that the certification, uh, group has, uh, has continued on. That to me was very useful. So that was my first assignment, so to speak, as we say, military assignment in the society was to run the certification committee. And then from there, Paul Frais, who was the president of society just cold, called me one day and said, Joe, we need a dictionary. I want you to form a dictionary task force. Okay. Again, couldn't say no. I said, okay. And again, with a lot of hard work by a lot of people, we put out the first simulation healthcare dictionary sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research, uh, federal US Federal Government Agency. And that dictionary now has gone through version 2.1, and we're working on version three in the next 24 months under the leadership of Dr. Uh, Lori Lisi. So I'm very proud that the dictionary has become a mainstay of people who write and people who, uh, do research in this field.

Deb: 12:47

Yeah, it it absolutely is. It's so important, you know, if you have a question, just look it up. And yeah, that really paved the way to helping us to elevate the science

Dr.Joe: 12:59

Excites us that people used a dictionary. In fact, when we see it quoted in articles that according to the dictionary, okay, that's great. People are paying attention. And of course, from there, because of my success with certification in the dictionary, I was appointed to the board of directors of the society to fill a, uh, a spot that was empty. And then once I got on the board of directors, I was honored to be asked to run for president. So I accept, again, can't say no. I said, okay, ran for president and was lucky to be elected as the 13th president of the Society for Simulation.

Deb: 13:29

Yes, you certainly did a lot to help standardize things within simulation. And that is the only way that you can raise the bar in my opinion.

Jerrod: 13:37

And it's just huge because you have beginners coming in that, you know, this healthcare simulation space is so new and there's no standard practice. Back to even the dictionary piece, it's, it's like, what do you call this thingy majig. Now there's, okay, we have a dictionary and then you go on to certification. It's okay, we know whether a set benchmark now globally. And so there's all these different benefits that under your advisement and, and of course it's a whole lot of people, but it takes a village to really move this industry forward. And, and I believe that steps that have been repeated under you, Dr. Joe, and, and, and of course many others, it just really see to how the industry has been matured and maturing still.

Dr.Joe: 14:17

One of my presidential projects was to actually create a little pathway for folks that we did publish in the society. So that if new members are coming in, they might ask, well, how do I get involved in the society? So the answer is you start with an affinity group or a committee or a, uh, a special interest group, and you join that group, kind of like the way I got into certification, right? You sit at the back of the room and you listen<laugh> and if it's interesting to you, you ask more questions. The next thing you know, they're asking you to help with this project. And then hopefully they

Jerrod: 14:45

Don't sneak out

Dr.Joe: 14:46

<laugh>. Yeah, they don't sneak out. That's right. And, uh, so people ask, how do we get started? That's how you get started. Thank you. You sit, you sit in the backing room and you listen. And I think I would offer the, uh, for principal listening to the podcast to renew, to simulation, to definitely wade in and, and try your hand at working on a task force or a committee or a council or call for volunteers. Don't say no. That's how you get started in the society. You'll never know where it can lead you, maybe someday even to be president.

Deb: 15:11

Yes. Thank you. Now you shared a little bit about virtual reality and, and some of that that you were speaking of. Do you wanna share a little bit about where you see the future of simulation going?

Dr.Joe: 15:21

Believe it or not, I don't think the future of simulation is in the technology or the methods, believe it or not. So I have a little bit different view about the future. I think technology will always advance us and will always have technology with us in simulation. Simulation after all is just a method. It's nothing more than that. So two things. One, I believe simulation now is so fully mature that it is a subspecialty of healthcare education. So think about that for a minute. In healthcare we have people who do healthcare and then we have people who subspecialize in a particular area. And for that there's principles, practices, research based ethics, dictionaries, and they, they subspecialize. So for example, you have a heart condition, you might start out with a general practitioner, but then you would migrate to a cardiologist if your condition got to the point where you needed some intensive care, right? Or better care or a higher level of care, I should say. Same thing in simulation. I think we're a fully recognized subspecialty of healthcare education. So medical education, healthcare education is a huge field and we're a subspecialty of that. So given that, I think the future is going to be that instead of learners always having to go to a simulation program or a simulation center or go to a hospital or an area to do simulation, I would like to see more and more of simulation coming to the learner. And I think that's where some of the technologies that we learned during the pandemic and also some of the technologies that are coming around where you don't have to go to a center and find a code and get into the door and find somebody to operate the mannequin. It all comes to you wherever you're working or maybe you're not working, maybe you're at home and you want to practice. So I think some of these screen-based simulations, uh, going forward, some of these remote simulations going forward is all, are all designed to bring the simulation to the learner rather than the learner go to the simulation. So I think that's where the future is.

Jerrod: 17:08

And do you think that the pandemic then helped accelerate this? Do you think it helped pivot the way the future was going? Do you think that that it altered the course? What did the pandemic do to healthcare simulation?

Dr.Joe: 17:22

So our own story is, is a, the typical story in the pandemic. You know, we had shut down for six weeks while we tried to figure out how do we deliver sim when no one can come to the sim center anymore, either learners or SP or even the staff<laugh>. So I think the pandemic ex, I know not think, I know the pandemic accelerated very early efforts to drive the delivery simulation to the learners where they lived or where they worked. There were some pilot efforts going on around the country, very small efforts, but the pandemic lit a fire under all those efforts cuz now it was a necessity to stay alive. You needed to deliver your sim program and you just couldn't shut down for three years because of coronavirus. So I'm pleased to see the kind of experiments people tried. We tried them here where we began training SPS remotely. We tried to deliver some skills instruction remotely. We tried but weren't very successful in doing, you know, mannequin resuscitations remotely. But other people have been more successful than we have here at our center. But all those things, I think jumpstarted the idea that, you know, the sim center could come to you, you don't have to come to the sim center. And while now that we're sort of easing out of the crisis, the he public health emergency and people are coming back to the center, we're seeing, you know, live events happening again. But what I hope doesn't get lost in the mix is that we did make progress in delivering simulation to where learners are. And we should continue down that route where we can. Thank

Deb: 18:44

You. Now, can you share with our listeners what you guys did during covid? What were the biggest like lessons learned essentially?

Dr.Joe: 18:53

So we touched on it earlier. So we're primarily, uh, about 60% of our operations are sp so for the most part we were bringing our SPS into the center to be trained as simulated patients where they go through the script and we rehearse and then they would go home, practice and then come back on the day of event. That was all done live and in person. There was expenses of travel, transportation, parking, uh, finding time. Uh, we learned to do all of that on a remote platform so that now we train many of our SPS remotely where they stay home. We, our p educators can, uh, send the scripts to them in advance. We, we rehearse the scripts, we rehearse the scenarios, we go over the assessment tools, we go over standard setting, we do that almost all remotely now. And then it's the day of the event that they show up or sometimes the event is remote or virtual and so they'd ever come to the center, they can do all of that remotely. And we're still doing that. So I think that was one lesson on the mannequin task trainer side. We realized that people really did want to come in and feel and touch and do, and while remote learning could happen, they, we re learned that really people prefer to come in and be there live. Although we did have great success at doing some remote debriefing and things like that. So that, that was useful. And then on the screen-based simulation side, we have, uh, accelerated efforts here to do more tablet-based refresher training for certain skills. So for example, we're a military medical school and nursing school, so a lot of our skills are related to acute trauma. And we were been dabbling in and right now starting to roll out some screen-based simulation on tablets that people could refresh themselves wherever they were at home at work on a commute<laugh>, they could refresh themselves without having come back to the sim center. And so I think our lessons learned from, and what we've done to the Coronavirus pandemic continues to exist and we're, we're happy about where we are and I'm happy where the field is going with remote simulation.

Deb: 20:48

Thank you. Now what are your thoughts on having a standardized test for standardized patients to make sure that they meet expectations similar to the certifications for simulation educators?

Dr.Joe: 21:01

So there is a body of, uh, literature and standards of practice for simulated patients, just like their standards of practice for mannequin simulation that in axle was the first, uh, society to put out standards of practice. Uh, they also put out a standards of practice for SP as well. So societies have recognized their standards of practice. I don't know if we need to give sp uh, a written test because in, in the standards for SP methodology as they exist now, we do screen and select those sps who are suitable for the learning objective we're trying to achieve. So we do bring in SPS and we give them sample scripts and we try them out and we give them sample assessment forms and we can see if they're reliable as assessors and we screen out those who are not as reliable as assessors or don't have the necessary skills to be a sp. So I think we already do do a sort of a test in the way we recruit, train, and deploy our sp So I'm not sure that a written test would necessarily add to any of that.

Deb: 22:02

Thank you. Jared's in the background getting the little baby. Ella and I have some very exciting news to share with you and Jared, my daughter just had a baby boy, they just sent the pictures through<laugh>.

Dr.Joe: 22:15

Congrats.

Deb: 22:16

Thanks. Thanks. It was a scheduled c-sections on none of us allowed to be there, but I guess we can go in in a couple hours.

Dr.Joe: 22:23

Well, congrats to both of you and uh, thank you for contributing to the specialty of pediatrics. I appreciate that,<laugh>. Thank

Jerrod: 22:29

You you're gonna be flooded with all these questions now, Dr. Joe.

Dr.Joe: 22:32

Oh, it's, I call it job security. I'm, I'm happy when people have babies cuz that means I have a job.<laugh>.

Deb: 22:37

Thank you. Thank you. We'll go ahead and can you share with our listeners the biggest thing you'd like them to know? Something that when you learned it, it changed the way you practiced a personal aha moment.

Dr.Joe: 22:50

Yeah, for me it was, uh, learning about the going to school to be a simulation educator. So I was a clinician for many, many years and a medical educator for many years. But those skills, while valuable and uh, necessary, are not sufficient to be a simulation educator because when you use simulation as an educational method, there are principles and practices that are different from clinical teaching at the bedside and are different from, you know, being a,healthcare professional and work in the clinical world. And oftentimes what I see is people with great skills, good intent, great clinicians, uh, great healthcare professionals try their hand at simulation and they fall into what they know best how to teach as a, as a clinician, as a healthcare professional. But you got to realize that there are principles and practices that are different about healthcare simulation that you may not always practice in the clinical world. So my, my take home message for the audience is it's not enough to say I've been doing simulation for 15 years, therefore I am a simulation educator. I think experience is important, but not sufficient. You need to go to school, you need to take courses, attend seminars, get continuing education if you can. There are many certificate courses now in healthcare simulation. There are your master's degrees with an emphasis on healthcare simulation. There is one or two PhD programs in modeling and simulation with an emphasis of healthcare. So there are a variety of levels of education people can take advantage of and go to school to learn how to be a healthcare simulation educator, not just a medical educator. Again, it's a subspecialty of healthcare education. So let's go to school and learn our subspecialty. Well, yes, take and pass the certification exam whether you're an educator or an operator, some have both. Yes, be curious and think about, uh, publishing some of your work to advance the field. Always practice and get better at your craft of being a healthcare simulation educator. There are always new things to learn. My biggest aha moment was, I believe listening to and, uh, learning from Jenny Rudolph about her advocacy inquiry method of debriefing and then Adam Chang and his, you know, pearls debrief and his group and his pearls debriefing method. I think those are the things that people should study, practice, try out, get feedback on, try again and always practice your craft, but practice your craft with an intention that is, I've looked at the literature, I've looked at this dentist of practice, I'm going to try this next time, I'm going to get feedback and I'm trying to get better. I'm not a perfect healthcare simulation educator, probably never will be. But I'm always trying to perfect my craft when I see simulation or observe simulation or conduct simulation or sometimes on the other end when I'm a victim of simulation<laugh> and I'm the learner always trying to strive to be better.

Deb: 25:35

Thank you. Thank you. Now is your center accredited by the Society for Simulation and Healthcare?

Dr.Joe: 25:41

Yes, it is.

Deb: 25:42

Okay. What areas are you accredited and why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about the process because it's a pretty hot topic now. I get a lot of questions on it and so I always, if we have guests that have gone through the process, like to ask'em a little bit about what it did for your organization and, uh, how the group felt about going through it.

Dr.Joe: 26:03

So accreditation was a very valuable exercise for our group here. I think we're in our third renewal now and we're accredited the highest level for all four elements there. Yes, assessment, research, teaching and systems integration. And we found systems integration to be the most challenging, but most useful. I think what accreditation does is it's a self-study, so it allows you to look at yourself in the mirror and decide what areas you have strengths in and what areas you can get better in. And so that was very useful in in constructing our strategic plan here at the sim center to be able to go through the accreditation process as a means to figuring out where we were and where we wanted to be. Secondly, it was gratifying to the staff to see what areas we were doing well in. And then we had some external validation from someone else that, hey, you're doing a good job. There are areas that you do well, uh, and have met standards. And then lastly, obviously when you're advocating for resources for your center, you can use accreditation to say, well, we really need this resource because if we don't get it, our accreditation is at risk. And you'd be surprised how many hospital systems and university systems love to brag about their accredited center. And then the flip side of that is, okay, if you wanna brag about it, give me some resources so we don't lose our accreditation. So I think it serves useful purposes, but I think the benefit to the staff and to the leadership of a sim center of going through accreditation far outweighs the challenges of having to go through the process. And it is a process, but then having that external validation I think is very reassuring when it

Deb: 27:29

Comes. Thank you. Thank you. And I think the other thing is, is that when someone doesn't wanna file the rules, you can always say, well, we, we have to file the rules because we're accredited.

Dr.Joe: 27:39

That's nice, isn't it,

Jerrod: 27:41

<laugh>? It's certainly a lengthy process, that's for sure. Why we wrap up here? Is there one thing that you wanna make, um, a lasting impression or what's, what's the one thing you'd want our listeners to remember about this conversation or about you that you can, you can teach,

Dr.Joe: 27:57

Uh, two. One is get involved in your professional societies, uh, that do simulation, whether that's a Society for Simulation Healthcare and INSCL, ASPI the Association of Standardized Patient Educators or the, uh, UK ASPI, which is another group of SP educators. Just get involved in your professional society, the networking you can, that you get there and oftentimes many simulation educators feel they're on an island or by themselves, a one of one or one of two shop and you feel lonely. Um, join your professional society, get involved in some of the special interest groups, get involved in the affinity groups, join committees because that comradery, that feeling of on part of a larger team here. And I'm doing good work and other people are doing work and I see that, uh, I, what I'm doing has value is, is really helpful. So get involved in your professional societies. And then my second point is, you know, go to school, right? Can get continuing education, uh, don't be satisfied and, and rest just done your experience. That was my two take home messages.

Deb: 28:53

Thank you very much. And with the listeners, these episodes of The Sim Cafe can count toward any of your certifications as continuing education. You write down who the guest is and three things that you have learned and Andrew Spain said that that will counted towards in case you don't like to take tests again. So I think any final thoughts, Dr. Joe or Jarrod?

Jerrod: 29:18

I appreciate you coming on. This has been really informative and I mean, your breadth and depth and knowledge is from the military. And thanks again for the service and you know, from pediatrics to now in the higher ed, it's with your professional development, there's, there's so much to unpack and I appreciate your time and going through it all.

Dr.Joe: 29:35

Well, you're most welcome and I appreciate the opportunity to, uh, be on your podcast.

Deb: 29:38

Thank you very much and happy Friday.

Dr.Joe: 29:42

Happy Friday.

Outro: 29:49

Thanks for joining us here at The Sim Cafe. We hope you enjoyed, connect with us at www innovative sim solutions.com and be sure to hit that like and subscribe button so you never miss an episode of The Sim Cafe.