Hands-on learning

AHS uses simulation as valuable teaching tool

Staff in the emergency department of Alberta Children’s Hospital don’t need to be convinced about the benefits of training through simulation.

Not after fate showed them how the learning tool can save lives.

Earlier this year, emergency staff at the Calgary hospital spent a morning huddled around a pediatric mannequin specially designed for medical training. They were learning how to recognize a case of congenital heart disease and administer prostaglandin, a rarely used drug that keeps fetal blood vessels open in children experiencing cardiac distress.

“It is a difficult drug to draw up for infusion and to administer,” says Dr. Vincent Grant, medical director of human patient simulation for KIDSIM at the Alberta Children’s Hospital.

Grant says the team of nurses, physicians and respiratory therapists initially struggled with the exercise but gradually became adept at the procedure. Good thing.

“Unbelievably, less than six hours later, a baby only a few days old rolled in, looking blue and having a lot of distress,” says Grant.

The team quickly established they were dealing with a congenital heart defect and snapped into action using the skills from that morning's training session.

“This treatment essentially saved this child's life,” says Traci Robinson, a simulation educator with Alberta Health Services (AHS).

Simulation training sessions are held regularly across the province in clinical areas such as critical, emergency, renal, operating room and post-anesthesia care.

Last year, AHS established eSIM (educate, Simulate, Innovate, Motivate), the only province-wide simulation program in Canada, and opened a dedicated simulation facility at the Edmonton General Continuing Care Centre. At the centre, health providers can practise a wide range of medical procedures on high-tech adult and child simulators, which breathe, blink, talk, and have pulses and vital signs.

There are also existing dedicated simulation spaces in Calgary at the Alberta Children’s Hospital (running since 2005), the Peter Lougheed Centre and currently under construction at the Foothills Medical Centre.

Meanwhile, eSIM outreach teams take the simulators to AHS facilities across the province to ensure AHS health providers, wherever they practise, have access to this valuable learning tool.  

“We’re doing simulation in people’s actual working environments. This makes for a more realistic experience,” Grant says of the simulation outreach program.

“Participants would rather have problems during these safe simulation scenarios rather than have them happening in real life.”

The eSIM program will help drive quality improvement throughout the system, says Dr. Stephen Duckett, AHS President and Chief Executive Officer.

“Through a train-the-trainer approach, these initiatives will ripple out across the province improving the quality of care to patients on the front line,” he says.

“This high quality of thinking we are seeing in our simulation programs will yield high quality patient care as we develop them system-wide.”

For the Alberta Children’s Hospital team that properly administered prostaglandin to that ill child, the simulation experience is one they’ll never forget.

“The team was truly raving about their ability to practise this case before having to perform it in real life,” Grant says.