The Clinical Simulation Center at Maimonides
The Clinical Simulation Center utilizes high fidelity robotic mannequins to foster prompt identification of serious illness, sound clinical reasoning and action, interdisciplinary collaborative team-based care, and certain procedural skills in a zero-fault environment. The simulation center at Maimonides serves as a unified interdisciplinary training center that addresses the realities of practice and patient care.
Our mission is to provide immersive and simulation-based educational programs for healthcare staff throughout Maimonides Medical Center and pre-hospital emergency services. The center creates a unique interdisciplinary training environment where healthcare staff from all professions work collaboratively to foster professional excellence, teamwork, and error reduction. This creates a safer environment for patients by using simulation and ultrasound technology in the training, assessment, and credentialing of trainees in resuscitative, invasive, and surgical procedures. Our simulation center also allows us to develop new immersive and simulation-based educational programs. Additionally, we aim to establish a leadership role in pioneering new technologies and methods for medical education and patient safety.
Our simulation scenarios cater to healthcare staff in training, as well as to seasoned professionals for continued skill development and multidisciplined collaborative team training
Task-specific training modalities
Our partial task trainers develop and maintain specialty-specific skills such as:
- Bronchoscopy
- Cardiac catheterization
- Endotracheal intubation
- Intravenous line placement
- Laparoscopic surgery, endoscopy, and colonoscopy
- Reteroscopy
- Retinal procedures
- Routine and difficult deliveries
- Umbilical artery cannulation
Compact ultrasound systems and tissue phantoms allow trainees to learn and practice safer ultrasound-guided techniques for invasive procedures, such as thoracentesis, paracentesis, vascular access, and regional anesthesia.
Surgery training
Emergency medicine
Practical concepts in Emergency Medicine
Complicated medical decision-making and emergent procedures are performed by Emergency Medicine residents and faculty on adult and pediatric high fidelity human patient simulators in a re-created Emergency Department patient bay.
Cadaver curriculum
Routine and advanced Emergency procedural training is provided to the residents using unembalmed cadavers.
Advanced invasive procedures
Providers gain experience in performing advanced Emergency Medicine procedures, such as pericardiocentesis, cricothyrotomy, and transvenous pacemaker insertion.
General surgery training
Surgical simulation is a vital educational tool for our residents and fellows. Our surgery simulation curriculum allows residents to participate in hands-on teaching, learning, and self-evaluation of several technical skills. Our residents undergo patient simulation to learn how to assess and manage patients on the emergency floor, emergency consult, and trauma situations.
The PGY-1 level residents participate in a surgery boot camp to learn core basic surgery skills. Our dedicated surgical attending faculty and simulation center staff are available for every simulation session to help support our students.
Skills reviewed include but are not limited to:
- Chest tube placement
- Central access placement
- Cricothyroidotomy
- Endovascular surgery trainer
- Floor emergencies
- Hand sewn bowel anastomosis
- Mesentery division
- Official fundamentals of laparoscopic surgery (FLS) skills training and testing center
- Percutaneous tracheostomy
- Stapled bowel anastomosis
- Sengstakin-Blakmore tube application
- Suture and knot tying
- Vascular anastomosis
- Virtual laparoscopic trainer with haptic feedback
- Virtual endoscopy trainer
Internal Medicine
Resuscitation skills
Providers practice resuscitation skills and team approach management during the care of simulated critically ill patients.
Obstetrics and Gynecology
Practical concepts in labor and delivery
Residents and faculty train in an interdisciplinary team environment in critical areas, such as managing maternal cardiac arrest, shoulder dystocia, and estimating blood loss.
Laparoscopic surgery
Residents train on a high fidelity laparoscopic simulator. Training includes specific task training as well as complete surgical procedures.
Orthopedic surgery training
Residents participate in weekly skills sessions at our state-of-the-art Center for Clinical Simulation. Our center houses 2 dedicated arthroscopy stations where residents master basic and advanced arthroscopic techniques in the shoulder, elbow, wrist, knee and ankle, utilizing both cadaveric and simulated tissues. Residents hone their microscopic surgical techniques on our high-fidelity teaching microscope. Additionally, an endless supply of synthetic bones is available on which residents refine their skills for open reduction and internal fixation of basic to highly complex fractures.
This curriculum is based on American Board of Orthopedic Surgery (ABOS) recommended modules for residents in postgraduate year 1 (PGY-1) with advancement throughout the other years. At the culmination of each simulation module, residents demonstrate their mastery of skills and techniques through either a summative or formative assessment depending on the content. This assessment provides the orthopedic team with a measure of confidence in the resident’s skill level before allowing him or her greater clinical autonomy, both in and out of the operating room.
The curriculum includes:
- Advance techniques in different regions
- Anatomy dissection
- Arthroplasty
- Arthroscopy training
- Basic skills
- Basic techniques of internal fixation
- Bone handling techniques
- External fixation
- K-wire techniques
- Principles and techniques of fracture reduction
- Casting and splinting techniques
- Compartment syndrome
- Fluoroscopy training
- Joint aspiration and injection
- Laparoscopic surgery
- Microsurgery
- Resuscitation skills
- Skeletal traction
- Soft tissue handling, suturing skills, and knot tying
- Sterile technique and orthopedic room set up
- Trauma
Nursing
New Hire RN Orientation
The course integrates principles of patient safety into all aspects of nursing care. Simulation scenarios recreate safety risks in both every day and crisis situations. Each new RN will have the opportunity to explore and practice these risk events during the first weeks of New Hire RN Orientation.
Pediatric care
These sessions provide real-to-life scenarios as the building blocks of pediatric nursing care. The simulation scenarios utilize a systems-based approach to explore physiologic, cognitive, and psychosocial events across the lifespan of children and include common disorders, monitoring, and therapeutic procedures.
Pediatric intensive care
The course provides critical training through real-to-life critical care scenarios necessary for nursing practice in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). Simulation scenarios build upon selected patient problems from the Pediatric Care curriculum and focus on multisystem disease and treatment, e.g. sepsis and respiratory failure.
Neonatal intensive care
This curriculum provides specialty training for the Neonatal Intensive Care (NICU) RNs. Simulation scenarios include the most common neonatal disorders. Each scenario is designed to explore signs and symptoms, as well as treatments for optimal outcomes, in full-term and premature infants.
Neonatal Resuscitation Program (NRP)
NRP is an education program of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Heart Association (AHA). The NRP guidelines require hands-on interactive simulation scenarios as part of the course requirements. Participants demonstrate NRP resuscitation via simulation to successfully complete the course.
Pediatrics
Pediatric resuscitation
Residents and health professionals practice resuscitation skills and team approach management while caring for simulated critically ill pediatric patients.
Neonatal Resuscitation Program (NRP)
NRP is an education program of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Heart Association, NRP participants learn and demonstrate NRP resuscitation via interactive simulation scenarios on a high fidelity neonatal simulator.