(This is a guest post from one of the medical education fellows at McMaster University. It describes one of the projects Kyla worked on during her fellowship year.
If you have a great simulation case that you want to share with the world, send it to the case bank. It will be peer-reviewed, so that you can include the submission in your teaching dossier / academic CV. The case will be shared via a Creative Commons licence. – Jonathan (@sherbino))
By Kyla Caners (@drcaners )
Relatively speaking, simulation is a labour-intensive method of teaching. It requires a high faculty to student ratio for a lengthy period of time. There are few ways to offset the number of instructors required for a given simulation session. (Using senior residents to teach junior residents is pretty much the only partial solution.) Further, the development of curricular content can be tedious. Writing high quality cases appropriate for learner level with clear objectives and a logical case progression is more challenging than it looks!
While going through the process of creating a novel simulation component for the curriculum of my emergency medicine program, it occurred to me that one way educators across the country could save a fair amount of time would be to share cases. While you can’t offset the number of instructors needed for each simulation session, you could certainly relieve the burden of case writing by sharing it with others. This is where the idea for emsimcases.com was born.
Collaborating with Martin Kuuskne of McGill University, who had just gone through the same process of creating a regular simulation curriculum for his program, we created a simulation case blog to address our mutual need. This blog will ultimately serve as a repository of simulation cases for emergency medicine educators to use. How fantastic would it if your residency program needs more toxicology practice and then simply go to the blog to find free, openly available, peer-reviewed cases in the content area of your choice with clear objectives to match? This is the void that emsimcases.com fills.
Not only will we provide a repository of simulation cases, but we will also provide posts on key content related to running quality simulation. Many educators are put into a position of running or teaching simulation before they understand or are familiar with the concepts involved. We aim to have a repository of content on the basics, as well as the latest and greatest, in simulation education.
Our blog is still in its infancy. But the response has already been fantastic. I think we’re on to something. Either way, we have certainly enjoyed developing our own little EM simulation community of practice. Collaborating with our colleagues has been the best reward.
Take a look for yourself at emsimcases.com!
Image ‘CPR Training-04’ by Rama. From Wikipedia Commons.