Dignity Health St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center - Learning Institute and Simulation Center in Phoenix, Arizona

Congratulations to Dignity Health St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center - Learning Institute and Simulation Center in Phoenix, Arizona, for recently earning ACS-AEI Comprehensive accreditation.

Learn about the facility in the interview below with Hahn Soe-Lin, MS, MD, FACS. Dr. Soe-Lin is currently St. Joseph's Surgical Director and a faculty physician in the trauma, emergency general surgery, and surgical critical care departments.

Tell us a little bit about your center.

Since its inception, the Learning Institute and Simulation Center has pioneered simulation training at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center. Growing from one room and through multiple expansion projects, the center now resides in more than 20,000 square feet of a former clinical unit within the acute care setting of the hospital. Within a safe and realistic learning environment, the learner can perform skills for educational learning, validation of competency, or to meet academic curriculum objectives. The center also allows students and professionals to not only practice medical and/or technical skills but also interact within interprofessional team scenarios. This combination of the application of knowledge, skills practice, and interprofessional environment is required for successfully training healthcare professionals in our increasingly complex healthcare environment. The center also houses a novel ultra-high-fidelity cadaveric-based procedural and operative training program, known as the Knowledge Donor program, that provides technical practice opportunities in realistic simulated operative environments with mechanical ventilation and advanced bleeding modeling.

What is your center's specialty or strength(s)?

This institute exists within a hospital-based interinstitutional learning and simulation center that trains students and residents in every healthcare discipline, including nursing, medicine, Physician Assistant, and all graduate medical education (GME) surgical and nonsurgical residencies. We interface with learners from Creighton Alliance, The University of Arizona, Mayo Clinic-Scottsdale, and multiple nursing schools throughout the Valley. In this context, the opportunities for interprofessional and team-based simulation training are myriad, and this is an important substrate for our goals of building ultra-high-fidelity clinical procedural and operative training programs.

What areas (if any) are you looking to expand or improve?

Areas for improvement include the need for increased simulation staffing in support of more ambitious high-fidelity simulation and improved connectivity between the hospital’s quality improvement teams and closed-loop, targeted interventions in simulation training. To date, we have succeeded at working within the budgetary constraints of an inbuilt hospital financial system with external grant-supported funding for specific high-fidelity simulation projects to fund both research fellowships as well as technical staff in support of scaling our academic and education efforts. We also have interest in implementing artificial intelligence-assisted development in scenario design and implementation to provide a higher scale of simulation scenarios given the growth of our learner population and the increased need for more interprofessional multi-scenario sims. We also are working with interested junior faculty to recruit and train additional clinician champions in simulation education to broaden our clinical bandwidth for proctoring, design, and implementation.

Do you have any upcoming educational events, research projects, or other opportunities that you'd like to share with members of the ACS-AEI Consortium?

We are in the process of designing an initial survey after discussion with the ACS- Accredited Education Institute (AEI) Research & Development Committee. The goal is to better understand the modalities and frequency/intensity of simulation being conducted across AEI simulation centers. Based on these results, we have a broader goal of aligning simulation evaluation instruments with what is happening on the real-world side of GME training programs with the rollout and increasing implementation of Entrustable Professional Activities (EPA). The hope is to invite members of the consortium to evaluate performance in simulation in as identical of a manner as possible to EPA instruments and leverage the multi-institutional datasets to better quantify the impact of simulation across a variety of fidelity levels and platforms, on national real-world resident EPA learning curves.

What do you hope to gain from being an AEI?

Our hope is to drive national thought leadership in simulation education and its interface with transformative surgical education by leveraging relationships and multi-institutional opportunities to share data across multiple simulation centers within the consortium and collaborate in their analyses.

If you are interested in collaborating or connecting with the Learning Institute and Simulation Center, contact Hahn Soe-Lin, MD, FACS, at hahn.soe-lin@commonspirit.org.