Jenny Rudolph interviews Victoria Brazil: Translational Simulation

Since the start of the modern simulation era, many in the healthcare simulation community have taken a “Field of Dreams” approach to our simulation efforts, believing, like the character Ray Kinsella in the movie of the same name, that we “If we build it, they will come.” Often however, “buy-in” to simulation programs is just as difficult as getting real people to come to a baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. Simulation increasingly competes with a variety of other healthcare education, quality, and safety efforts for resources.

In this podcast, Jenny Rudolph talks with Victoria Brazil talk about Victoria’s alternate approach to positioning simulation in healthcare. Rather than creating simulation programs and then hoping people will come, instead, she argues, we need to solve real clinical problems, using goals co-created with the colleagues we aim to serve. This work focuses on clinical impact and culture change via what she calls “translational simulation. Translational simulation focuses our attention on identifying and addressing high yield problems at the “coal face” of clinical care. The focus is on simulation interventions that stretch outcomes beyond clinical and teamwork skills to improving clinical benchmarks, clinical outcomes and the patient journey.

Is this the same age-old exhortation to focus on patient quality and safety or something different?

Join the Center for Medical Simulation and Simulcast as we explore Victoria’s most recent publication on translational simulation and links to work by Bill McGaghie, and other exemplary work in the field.

Victoria Brazil is an emergency physician and host of Simulcast, director of the Gold Coast Simulation Service in Queensland Australia, and Professor at Bond University Medical School.  

Jenny Rudolph is an organizational behavior scholar, executive director of the Center for Medical Simulation in Boston, and an Assistant Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

PODCAST LINK

The links and articles below provide detail on a number of the studies and processes Jenny and Victoria discuss in the podcast.

Translational simulation: not “where?” but “why?” A functional view of in situ simulation.

Brazil, V. Advances in Simulation (2017).

https://advancesinsimulation.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41077-017-0052-3

For more information on the theory and measurement of “relational coordination” which Brazil, Purdy and team will be using to study the impact of translational simulation take a look at the work of Jody Hoffer Gittell and team at the Relational Coordination Research Collaborative website:

https://rcrc.brandeis.edu/

Bill McGaghie’s seminal article on “Medical Education Research As Translational Science” is a must read for educators designing or redesigning simulation for clinical impact.

McGaghie, W. (2010)

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/2/19/19cm8

Some of the issues regarding translational simulation might be terminology - as discussed here

 ( http://simulationpodcast.com/53-2/ )

Examples of translational simulation in action

To keep women from dying in childbirth, look to California

Montagne, R. NPR (2018)

https://www.npr.org/2018/07/29/632702896/to-keep-women-from-dying-in-childbirth-look-to-california

The California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative

https://www.cmqcc.org

When every second counts: How a simulation dramatically improved blood delivery times for trauma patients

Daugherty, A. (2018)

http://www.stmichaelshospital.com/media/detail.php?source=hospital_news/2018/0813