The mission of the ANW Center for Clinical Simulation is to be the premier resource facility for simulation-based education in the healthcare curricula of Abbott Northwestern Hospital's allied health disciplines. The center is committed to multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary education, research, and assessment, with the ultimate focus on excellence in patient care and patient safety.
In early 2009, the new Abbott Northwestern Center for Clinical Simulation was completed. The new center was founded by the Internal Medicine Residency Program, and provides high-fidelity simulation in replica ER and ICU rooms for multi-disciplinary training of code situations, emergency management, and high-risk/low-frequency scenarios. The center's AV system captures scenarios, and facilitates video debriefing following the simulation. Laerdal's new SimMan 3G is the simulation "centerpiece" of the center.
Residents are the core training group utilizing the simulation center, and the center is lead by the internal medicine residency faculty with help from faculty in the departments of critical care, emergency medicine and nursing education. It allows for multi-disciplinary training and interaction between different members of the healthcare team including nursing, pharmacy, physicians, anesthesia, etc., a skill that is critical to an efficient and safe healthcare team.
The Center for Clinical Simulation's procedure lab allows Abbott Northwestern Hospital's faculty and residents to apply state-of-the-art simulation to learning the practice of invasive procedures in a risk-free environment with the ultimate goal being benefit to our patients. Simulation training is an integral part of the procedure rotation during your first year of residency. This one-on-one rotation was started in response to the national trend for an increasing role of using high-fidelity "ultrasound-real" patient simulation to foster experiential procedure training in a safe environment, and to increase the volume and quality of procedures our internal medicine residents perform. The center has ultrasound-real thoracentesis, central line, and arterial line simulators. In addition, there is a lumbar puncture simulator, IV simulators, shoulder injection simulator, and knee injection/arthrocentesis simulator. There is also a dedicated ultrasound machine used for procedure and ultrasound training of the residents.
Whenever ultrasound is used for an actual procedure on a patient, we have a simulator that is also "ultrasound-real", to approximate the real experience as closely as possible.
