Jeff Cooper, CMS Executive Director, was chosen to deliver the 2011 Lewis H. Wright Memorial Lecture at this year’s American Society of Anesthesiologist’s Annual Meeting.  In his lecture, titled  “APSF and Anesthesia Patient Safety: Leadership Lessons From the Legacy of Jeep Pierce”, Dr. Cooper described the beginnings of the patient safety movement and the founding of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF). He spoke about the vison and leadership of its founders, who included Dr. Ellison “Jeep” Pierce, and commented on how anesthesiology was at the forefront of this sea of change nearly 20 years ahead of the rest of medicine. Dr. Cooper concluded by noting that focused research and clinical improvements over the past 26 years have made anesthesiology very safe. And, that although the anesthesia community should feel very good about these improvements in patient safety, there is still much work to be done.

Boston Simulation Community Research and Education Meeting
CIMIT Boston Simulation Consortium Quarterly Meeting
December 13th, Tuesday from 5:00-7:00 pm
Center for Medical Simulation
65 Landsdowne Street, Cambridge, MA, 1st Floor

This meeting will focus on topics of interest to the greater Boston simulation community such as the upcoming Society for Simulation in Healthcare Annual meeting (IMSH), the development of a collective simulation website calendar for Boston area simulation centers and potential grant opportunities.

The Boston Simulation Community Research and Education Meetings provide a friendly and informal venue for simulation educators and researchers to present work-in-progress, discuss relevant ideas from other disciplines and connect with others with an interest in simulation. The meetings are held on the 2nd Tuesday of each month. Please join us!

Up-coming meetings:

January 10th:
Preparation and preview for International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare, 2012. If you would like to present a work in progress for feedback from the group or give a preview of your completed presentation we welcome your work. Contact  Jenny Rudolph at jwrudolph@partners.org.

February 21:
Emily Hayden, MD, MEd, Gilbert Program in Medical Simulation, Harvard Medical School, Department of Emergency Medicine and Massachusetts General Hospital Learning Lab
Measuring Problem Representation Among Preclinical Medical Students Following Mannequin Simulations.
Clinical reasoning is an important skill for medical students to acquire during both their pre-clinical and clinical years. Based on the work on teaching problem representation as a framework for clinical reasoning, the purpose of this project was to develop an instrument capable of detecting differences between students who were trained to use problem representation versus those who were not.

We’ve added two IMS “Simulation as a Teaching Tool” Simulation Instructor Workshops in 2012.  The first workshop will be held at the Medical Simulation Center at Loma Linda University  in Loma Linda, California from February 6-9, 2012.  A few months later the CMS Faculty will head to New York City where they’ll teach the course at the Institute for Medical Simulation and Learning (IMSAL) at the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx.

Taught by CMS’ Harvard faculty, the Simulation as a Teaching Tool Workshop is a 4-day intensive immersion in healthcare simulation that is specifically designed for those educators seeking to develop high quality simulation programs. It covers high level elements and concepts involved in using simulation as a teaching tool.

Drawing on the disciplines of aviation, healthcare, psychology, experiential learning, and organizational behavior, participants learn how to teach clinical, behavioral, and cognitive skills through simulation. Participants explore simulator based teaching methods applicable across the healthcare education spectrum, including undergraduate and graduate medical, nursing and allied health domains.

The daily formats vary and include simulation scenarios, lectures, small and large group discussions, and practical exercises with feedback. Ample opportunities are provided for networking and sharing experiences. Attendees join a growing community of Institute graduates who are positioned as leaders in the field.

Tuition for this workshop is $4,000

To learn more about the workshop, or to apply, visit the Center for Medical Simulation (CMS) website’s IMS webpage at
http://www.harvardmedsim.org/ims/html. You can also email CMS at info@harvardmedsim.org , or call Gary Rossi, CMS’ COO at 617.768.8267

IMS LOMA LINDA FLYER 
IMS IMSAL NY FLYER

Join your Simulation colleagues on Tuesday October 11, from 5:30-7pm for the monthly Boston Simulation Community Research and Education Meeting.  The meeting is being hosted by Center for Medical Simulation,  65 Landsdowne Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

 A  Conversation with John Morey PhD, senior research psychologist at Dynamics Research Corporation, Andover, MA.  The Sim Center Goes to War:  Using Civilian Simulation Centers for Army National Guard and Reserve Medical Unit Training

Dr. John Morey is the senior research psychologist at Dynamics Research Corporation, Andover, MA,  and has 33 years of experience as a practicing human factors specialist and applied psychologist. For the past twenty years Dr. Morey has been conducting research into methods to improve performance in high skill, mission-critical military and healthcare work settings. He was a member of the original development team for the MedTeams® project, a joint civilian and military program to transition lessons-learned from aviation crew resource management to health care. Most recently he has been conducting research to improve simulation training opportunities for Army National Guard and Reserve medical care providers. His earlier research involved improving individual and team performance through the use of aviation and combat vehicle full-mission simulators. Dr. Morey has led projects to improve skilled performance training programs, the design and evaluation of job performance aids, the analysis of workload, measuring the relationship between attitudes and performance, and operational improvements in visual and mechanical systems used by high-performance teams. Dr. Morey holds a PhD from the University of Georgia in experimental psychology, and has over 80 publications, presentations, and technical reports in  human factors and training development.
 
About the Boston Simulation Community Research and Education Meeting:

BSCREM meetings provide a friendly and informal venue for simulation educators and researchers to present work-in-progress, acquaint each other with relevant ideas from other disciplines and connect with others. We meet the 2nd Tuesday of each month.

Everyone here at the Center for Medical Simulation extends their heartfelt congratulations to Catherine “Kate” Morse, MSN, RN, CCRN, CRNP-BC on being chosen as the receipient of a Jonas Scholarship to help support her studies toward a  PhD in Nursing.  Kate, who is an Alumna of CMS’ IMS Comrehensive and Gradute courses is an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Division of  Graduate Nursing at Drexel University.  Kate is one of only 58 people from across the country to receive this prestigious scholarship.

The Jonas Center for Nursing Excellence was established in 2006 by the Barbara and Donald Jonas Family Fund to advance the profession of nursing  in novel and traditional ways. Through its philanthropy, the Center has awarded nearly $3 million towards the Jonas Nurse Leaders Scholar Program to support the education of new nursing faculty, to stimulate joint faculty appointments between schools of nursing and clinical affiliates and to bring together opinion leaders to develop solutions to long-standing problems challenging the nursing profession

Last Thursday CMS had the honor of hosting Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger”.  Captain Sullenberger is the pilot who safely landed US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River in January, 2009 saving everyone on board after his aircraft hit a flock of birds knocking out both engines after takeoff. Captain Sullenberger, who retired from US Airways after thirty years of services in March, 2010, is a recognized expert on airline safety.  He’s  served as an instructor and as the Air Line Pilots Association Safety Chairman where his safety work led to the development of the Federal Aviation Administration Advisory Circular. Captain Sullenberger was instrumental in developing and implementing the Crew Resource Management course that is used by US Airways.  Since 2007 he has run his own consulting firm, Safety Reliability Methods (SRM), Inc. which provides expert solutions to complex problems involving safety, high performance, and high reliability in the aviation industry. And, this past May he became the Aviaition and Safety Expert for CBS News. Captain Sullenberger is  interested in learning more about what can be done to improve safety in the healthcare sector and visited CMS  to see the cutting work we’re doing using simulation to help improve the quality and safety of care delivered to patients.

For the past 4 months CMS has had the distinct pleasure of having Dr. Guillermo Ortiz-Ruiz as a visiting Simulation Fellow. Dr. Ortiz-Ruiz hails from Bogota, Columbia where he is the Director of the Critical Care Department at Hospital Santa Clara and the Director of the Postgraduate Program in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Universidad el Bosque.  He is an internationally recognized expert on managing sepsis in the ICU setting and has published numerous articles as well as a text on sepsis. Dr. Ortiz-Ruiz came to CMS to receive in depth training on developing a world class simulation program. While at CMS he worked on a project creating simulation scenarios that utilize sepsis bundles.  After his return to Columbia, Dr. Ortiz-Ruiz will be involved in the development of a multi-site simulation program in Bogota. 

This Thursday evening,  June 23rd, Dr. Ortiz-Ruiz will speak at the Boston Simulation Community Research and Education Meeting on “Using Simulation to Improve the Management of Sepsis in the ICU”.  The meeting will be held at The Center for Medical Simulation, 65 Landsdowne Street, Cambridge, MA 02139 and will start at 5:30 pm.  Dr Ortiz-Ruiz will be returning to Columbia on Saturday. Everyone here at CMS will miss Guillermo and wish him great success on his new Simulation Center project.

F

Finished up the latest round of the Harvard Anesthesia Resident Performance Assessment Group Study (HARPAG) on Friday at CMS.

Dr Rick Blum, an Anesthesiologsit from Children’s Hospital Boston, is the Prinicpal Investigator of the HARPAG study whose aim is to improve patient safety by building on an ongoing pilot research study to develop an effective, credible, ongoing, simulation enabled assessment to more reliably identify anesthesia residents at an early stage of training who may
ot have attained sufficient skills. Rick believes that early intervention is more likely to have a positive impact on attaining proficiency or directing residents toward another specialty with the goal of ensuring that no underperforming resident graduates from a residency program.

NPSF Congress – May 2011 

CMS’ Jeff Cooper led a stellar team of simulation experts in conducting an amazing Plenary session at the National Patient Safety Foundation annual congress on Friday, May 27 in Washington, DC.  Doug Bonacum, VP of Safety Management for Kaiser Permanente and co-chair of the NPSF meeting, did a quite memorable introduction of Jeff to the audience.  Haru Okuda led a “sim wars”-like onstage simulation with an Emergency Department team from the Washington Medical Center, Medstar Health.  The team managed the care of a patient who had chest pain while in the audience.  Robin Wootten was the patient’s simulation wife and got him up onto the onstage “Emergency Department”, where he became a mannequin, of course.  An error committed by confederate nurse Jared Kutsin led the team to have a disclosure discussion with the family, accompanied by a (confederate) patient safety officer, who was in the audience.  Paul Preston and Connie Lopez led the debriefing of the disclosure.  Jeff ended the session with an overview of the scope and purposes of simulation.  The session was a powerful learning experience about simulation and especially its use for practice in disclosing adverse events.

Introduction of Jeff Cooper, NPSF Congress – May 2011 

All of us here at CMS know how remarkable a person and leader Jeff is, so it’s great when we hear that others feel the same way.  The following is the introduction to the audience at the NPSF’s Plenary Session  given by Doug Bonacum, VP of Safety Management for Kaiser Permanente and co-chair of the meeting: (more…)