Simulations are useful in medical education, providing trainees with experience in:
- Common Skills, in a safely controlled setting, prior to having them engage patients clinically, and
- Rare Situations, that arise so infrequently that the only realistic way to provide clinical exposure is through simulation.
Simulation is also useful in testing students. A simulation creates a clinical scenario, in which the student is expected to demonstrate a skill or knowledge. The simulation provides patient safety, reproducibility for each student, and control over clinical variables.
Electronic Simulated Outpatient Clinics
To expand the clinical experience of the students in ambulatory medicine, I’ve made good use of simulated clinics that the students can access online. An example of their use can be seen here, at OBGYN Morning Rounds.
Using Adobe Captivate as the programming tool, I found the clinics to be easy to create.
For more detailed discussion of the simulated clinics, click here.
Simulated Hospital Rounds
The same rationale for simulation can be applied to rounding in the hospital. In my real hospital, whenever I round with the students, I’m mostly limited to talking about the spectrum of clinical problems that circumstance places in the hospital at that time. So I might have three cases of threatened preterm labor, and no cases of tubal ectopic pregnancy.
In my simulated hospital, since I control who is admitted, I can insure that students get an even exposure to each 0f the 80 (or so) clinical problems that lead women to be admitted.
For this simulation, I’ve used a podcasting format (audio only), that imagines I’m standing outside the patient’s room, explaining to the students:
- The story of what brought the patient to the hospital.
- How we knew what was wrong with her.
- What we did about it.
- Why our approach didn’t work out, and how we modified it to make her well.
Of course, I use this patient as an example of a clinical problem to enable me to expand further on the clinical problem itself (“Backward Teaching”…as opposed to “Frontward Teaching” such as a formal lecture).
Click Here to review some of the Rounding Simulations