Students from University of Maryland School of Nursing, University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, and the Salisbury University Respiratory Therapy Program at USG participated in USG’s first Interprofessional Critical Care Simulation on April 1, 2011. The event highlighted the value of collaborative healthcare education and modeled a team-based appraoch to patient care for an audience of more than 100 students, staff and faculty, and local healthcare professionals.
The program opened with a simulation of critical care treatment for a motorcycle accident victim who becomes unresponsive and experiences difficulty breathing while recovering from surgery. Sim Man, an $88,000 human patient simulator who talked, breathed, and moaned like a real human, acted as the ailing patient in the mock hospital suite. Students from all three medical disciplines worked together, each offering their specific expertise, to stabilize the patient as the audience looked on.
Watch the video of the Interprofessional Critical Care Simulation.
Pamela Shumate, MSN, RN, CCRN-CMC, Faculty
Ashleigh Vines, Student
Habtam Ayalew, Student
Jay A. Perman, MD, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), participated in the simulation as the attending physician and followed the demonstration with a lecture on the importance of interdisciplinary education. His talk pointed to published studies that demonstrate greater patient satisfaction and improved patient care in a team-based healthcare setting, but noted that further research is a priority and several barriers exist within the United State’s university and healthcare systems.
Dr. Perman created the Interdisciplinary Education Task Force at UMB and holds "President's Clinic", a hands-on, collaborative educational opportunity offered at UMB’s home campus. During the weekly clinic, students from UMB’s six professional schools (medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, law, and social work) visit patients with Dr. Perman, a pediatric gastroenterologist, and his nurse practitioner partner.
USG's Committee on Collaboration, Interdisciplinary and Interprofessional Education (CIPES), who presented Interprofessional Critical Care Simulation, will build on the importance of this event with the development of a new course to be offered at USG. Interprofessional Approach to Critically Ill Patients will begin in Fall 2011.