The Value of Simulation
STRATUS provides clinicians with the experience they need to perform better – whether in the operating room, at the clinic, in the pre-hospital environment or the emergency department – wherever experience counts. Unlike typical lecture-based curricula, simulation provides adult learners with an appropriate and engaging context from which learning and teaching becomes easier.
Just as flight simulation training for pilots builds necessary confidence and provides the opportunity to practice vital skills, STRATUS enables healthcare providers to practice in a predictable and safe environment building both competence and confidence – helping to prepare for even rare events. By replicating real life medical situations, STRATUS enhances training, performance and patient safety.
Improved patient safety
Providing competent and safe patient care, the most critical functions of a healthcare professional, requires a clinician to have both expertise and confidence. Whether performing complex surgery, treating a victim at an accident scene, or resuscitating a patient in an intensive care unit, the provider needs to have the ability to efficiently assess patients and perform multiple complex tasks – and they must get it right the first time.
Enhanced skills
At any time, healthcare professionals may be presented with a challenging clinical presentation – one that may occur so infrequently that a provider’s only prior exposure may be through reading or prior non-experiential education. Yet, the provider must be able to respond with both expertise and confidence. STRATUS provides real-time interactive simulation systems to improve the skill level of healthcare providers through the use of technology-based simulation training, assessment and treatment.
More simulation advantages:
- Risk-free learning. Simulation training gives providers the opportunity for recurring directed practice of psychomotor skills while familiarizing themselves with instruments and equipment, gaining experience in recognizing problems, developing decision-making skills, refining technique and procedures, and experiencing common as well as relatively rare medical conditions – all without putting patients or themselves at risk.
- A proven approach. The aviation industry has long recognized that training, performance, and safety could be enhanced by the use of flight simulators to practice a wide variety of flight emergencies and to gain proficiency in the use of specific aircraft and equipment. Now similar technologies have been applied to patient simulators giving providers an invaluable learning opportunity. Increasingly more common in healthcare settings, simulation is being recognized as an integral component of pre-clinical and clinical education. Studies of medical simulation have shown decreased complications, increased confidence, greater proficiency and steeper learning curves.
- More robust training. Medical simulation bridges the gap between traditional training methods, such as classroom instruction, and provides the ability to present "clinical situations" of varying complexities in a predictable and deliberate manner to provide immediate feedback regarding the decisions and actions taken, and assess training competency.
- Teaching teamwork. STRATUS is one of the few places where healthcare providers come to learn as an interdisciplinary team. We create scenarios that simulate real clinical situations and teach valuable skills in a confidential and safe environment.
Who benefits from training?
The STRATUS Center for Medical Simulation enables healthcare providers and students the opportunity to learn and perfect skills by experiencing reality-based patient care presentations in a wide range of simulated environments. Care-based simulation scenarios are applicable to a variety of medical, surgical, and nursing disciplines as well as allied health professionals including EMS, respiratory therapy and others.
