When I look around the digital landscape of the healthcare simulation industry, I see a much different place than I did 10 years ago when I started HealthySimulation.com. In 2009 when first I sat down in the Director‘s office at the Nevada System of Higher Education’s Clinical Simulation Center of Las Vegas, there was very little help online to guide me over the next 3 years. I faced opening a brand new lab with new staff, new faculty, new facilities, and no policies, standard operating procedures, or training. A handful of books, a few annual in-person conferences each year, some vendor websites, some twitter conversations, list-servs, and youtube videos — and the rare chance to connect and learn from others, was all I had. A decade ago I believe the most followed social media account for the entire industry was Laerdal Medical‘s, which only had 4,000 followers on Facebook. There were very few email newsletters, sporadic tweets, and certainly no HealthySimulation.com.
But that’s all changed now.
Today, online feeds on every major social media network show us thousands of clinical simulation champions, from universities, professional healthcare institutions, and corporations sharing about their latest moulage skins, research publications, accreditation progress, book chapters, poster presentations, virtual conference updates, product innovations, certification awards, staff promotions, global partnerships, and daily successes.
Through HealthySimulation.com’s featured articles, or from The Simulcast podcast, or a Twitter retweet, in Forums, facebook groups chats, LinkedIn company page invitations, non-profit organizational website blog posts, uploaded to youtube, recorded on zoom, and in Virtual Reality theaters, the global community is sharing like never before. The discourse keeps growing and that’s exciting for us at HealthySimulation.com — as it means there is so much more good news to share!
But the slow and steady increase to the community size and its discourse was still not enough to transition the field of medical simulation from early-adopter into early-majority in developed countries this year. Massive paradigm shifts still need catalyst events, and unfortunately, we got one with COVID-19.
By April of 2020 the entire world just turned to healthcare and said “quickly, save us”. For everyone, everything changed, and there is little doubt that some things will never go back to the way they were before. From our reporting over the past 10 years we have never heard so consistently the same thing from everywhere in healthcare simulation, and all at the same time: “We needed to change the way we do training — right now“. And so we did.
Each of us, has answered the call and stepped up to the occasion, whether its creating a flexible operations plan as Lou Clark and her team at M Simulation have done, or rapidly adopted new technologies to keep education going like Dr. Kellie Bryant and her team at Columbia University School of Nursing did. The community recognized the opportunity to rapidly deploy effective training strategies and new learning tools — highlighting our success with a Manifesto of action. The number of COVID-19 clinical simulation tools which the community produced was staggering!
Permanent change is finding its way through the cracks in our bureaucratic dams, and simulation in healthcare will come out better for it. Road blocks (both people and otherwise) to innovation were overruled as the situation became dire and resources became scarce. Even laggards that previously refused to acknowledge our progress had to confess anything was worth a shot. Zoom combined the telephone and the board room into one ubiquitous platform, telesimulation became our latest innovation, and remote-based distance-based learning technologies literally enabled us to think outside the box. Simulation is helping to save the day.
In the end, I believe history will note that healthcare simulation training had an important role to play in this chaos that plagued the world — one which continued to increase in adoption and utilization in faster ways from this point forward.
So here we are — starting a new chapter in book of Healthcare Simulation, and who better to help author our future than the most important voice in the global community — your own!
One of our primary goals at HealthySimulation.com is to share the stories of those finding success with healthcare simulation. Over the past 10 years we have published countless articles submitted by readers just like you, who wanted to share more about their simulation program, product, service, outcomes, strategies, tactics and achievements. Stories like how a new study finds VR effective for ACLS training with 83% cost savings by the team at Health Scholars and The Best Ways to Reopen a Simulation Center During COVID-19 by Dr. Kim Baily, which show us all the ways to overcoming challenging boundaries to early entry — stories which demonstrate that improving outcomes through clinical simulation is indeed possible. We champion you champions!
And now we have launched an all new webinar platform designed to further empower leading voices in our community, to share best practices in the multitude of circumstances necessary to effectively run a medical simulation center. With hour long presentations we can start to dig deeper into the vast experience of industry giants and learn innovative new practices from the latest converts. (We just applied for contact hours too!) Webinar presentations like How Many Do Well Often: Learning From Success in Mundane Situations by Dr. Peter Dieckmann and Scenario Design for Translational Simulation by Dr. Victoria Brazil, which give us hope in these challenging times and the means to turn lemons into lemonade.
Either by submitting an article or sharing a presentation through our new webinar service, we at HealthySimulation.com look forward to sharing your voice with the global healthcare simulation community.
I look forward to writing the next chapter of simulated training with you!
-Lance Baily
Founder/CEO – HealthySimulation.com
