INNOVATIONS

Recent innovations and programs developed in the Simulation and Integrative Learning Institute

• Telehealth Communication Project: Telehealth is a rapidly expanding modality for interacting with patients and colleagues. We piloted the use of standardized patients to assess surgical residents’ communication skills in a telemedicine encounter, and are developing additional Telehealth training and assessment programs for 2011-12 in collaboration with the UIC Telehealth initiative.
• Outpatient Center QA Project: Standardized patients visited the UICMC Outpatient Care Center incognito as “mystery shoppers” as part of the customer service quality assurance program. Their experiences resulted in the production of video vignettes and workshops for clinic directors and staff.
• Standardized Patients in Second Life: Second Life is an immersive screen-based environment in which avatars interact with each other in a virtual world.  SAIL piloted the use of standardized patients in this environment, and Margaret Czart, a UIC Public Health doctoral student, developed an instructional module in which students counseled Second Life “patients” on lifestyle changes.
• Central Line Insertion and Removal Workshops: Central lines are a cause of preventable infections and morbidity in seriously ill hospital patients.  These interprofessional workshops, developed in SAIL by an interdisciplinary, interprofessional group of faculty and hospital staff, are providing standardized training and assessment of nurses and residents across specialties such as internal medicine, emergency medicine, surgery, anesthesia and pediatrics.
• Moderate Sedation Workshop: Mannequin scenarios and advanced skills training allow interprofessional teams of nurses, GI fellows and attending physicians to practice responding to emergencies that occur during moderate sedation for GI procedures.  The scenarios were developed in the GCPC by a multidisciplinary team of physicians, nurses and patient safety experts, and will be modified for use by other specialties that use moderate sedation.

Pediatric Resident Procedural Skills Workshop and Mannequin Scenarios:  A collaborative effort of SAIL, Department of Pediatrics, and MHPE student Beverley Robin resulted in the development of checklists, demonstration videos and an instructional workshop for pediatric procedural skills, and a series of mannequin scenarios that allow residents to practice responding to pediatric emergencies.