By Latika Nirula, Director, Simulation & Teaching Excellence, CAMH Education
The world of simulation in education, especially in mental health, has been advancing rapidly. Recently, CAMH Education’s Dr. Latika Nirula and our Simulation Team have lead the way for an international simulation education partnership, which is working to achieve the goals of the Medical Psychiatry Alliance.
Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to learn more about this groundbreaking program. In this introductory post, Latika explains how the project began.
At a conference in New Orleans back in the winter of 2014, I found a note pinned to a poster I was presenting with my colleague, geriatric psychiatrist Dr. Petal Abdool. To my surprise, the note was from Dr. Sean Cross, Director of the Simulation Centre at the Maudsley in London, UK. The little note read: We should talk.
Our poster presentation summarized a review of the literature that Petal and I conducted, examining the use of simulation in undergraduate psychiatry. Our simulation education program at CAMH, a part of the Medical Psychiatry Alliance (MPA), was still new at the time and we were just starting to build out resources, programming and staffing. I was thrilled at the prospect of connecting with Sean, who was leading the first simulation centre focused on mental health in the UK, and promptly followed up with his request to speak further.
Simulation in health care is not new—many health disciplines have been using simulation to build competence in health professionals in communication, team work and other core clinical skills for years. This has further extended to the use of simulation in psychiatry, taking advantage of a variety of modalities, including simulated patients, virtual reality, video-based cases and manikins, to create realistic learning opportunities for the complex cases our clinicians see in practice. Hospitals across Toronto and beyond have well-established programs in dedicated simulation spaces.
But I was eager to connect with Sean because I hadn’t encountered others doing what we were embarking on – building a dedicated simulation centre and education program, exclusively focused on enhancing mental health care through simulation. Along with our distributed video-observation system (VOS) at CAMH, we were uniquely positioned to marry in-situ and centralized simulation-based learning in a mental health hospital, the first of its kind globally.
Fast forward a year and a half, and our CAMH simulation team and partnership with Maudsley Simulation has grown and developed into an international collaboration focused on mental health simulation. We have engaged other collaborators globally, including those in the US, Australia and Brazil. In June, the Maudsley and CAMH teams offered two simulation courses at CAMH focused on the intersection of mental and physical health. These courses were designed and delivered by the Maudsley, giving us the opportunity to learn from our international colleagues. The offerings in Toronto were a chance to pilot and explore the applicability of the curriculum in a Canadian health care context.
The Maudsley courses focused on the intersection of mental and physical health are particularly relevant to the MPA, which is a partnership between four organizations in Toronto: CAMH, University of Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children and Trillium Health Partners. CAMH’s simulation program has been established to address the gap in care individuals with both mental and physical health concerns experience through innovative simulation-based training. Our CAMH Simulation team will share findings and experiences related to our unique pilot of these courses in future posts.
It is truly amazing about what can start and grow from just a little note!
For more information about the SWAMPI evaluation have a click on these CAMH Education and International Mental Health Simulation Collaboration posts:
- Part 2: It Takes a Team of People–Both Real and Simulated
- Part 3: Realizing the Potential of Diversity in Interprofessional Health Care Teams: Simulation Education as an Opportunity for Shared Learning
- Part 4: 5Qs with A Simulation Team Research Analyst
- Part 5: That's a Wrap!
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