South Okanagan healthcare workers and students will now have the opportunity to learn from realistic and safe medical procedures through a new medical simulation training center.
The centre is the fourth one that has opened in the Interior Health Region and is located at the Penticton Regional Hospital.
“We saw a demand within the South Okanagan, our center in Kelowna is incredibly busy and with the growing family residency program in Penticton, with our collaboration with UBC, it was identified that that was our next move,” said Interior Health (IH) Simulation Program manager Chelsea Holmes.
“This center in Penticton actually also supports the other outreach sites within the South Okanagan. So, supports Princeton, Oliver, and Keremeos as well.”
According to Interior Health, simulation programs are designed to create medical scenarios that are often low-frequency, high-risk events like cardiac arrest or major trauma.
The centres provide an opportunity for students to practice together in a similar environment with their own equipment, while also utilizing mannequins, actors, and other tools to re-create major incidents.
“Most often we use mannequins which are high technology, robots essentially, that resemble a human in various forms. Whether it be an adult, a child, or sometimes a baby or an infant, these mannequins are all run by a computer,” said Holmes.
“We can provide vital signs, we can provide a heart rate, we can provide a blood pressure, we can make the mannequins talk, they can breathe, people can actually assess the mannequins and receive feedback from the mannequins as if they were a real person.”
According to IH, the program became the only program in B.C. to be accredited by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada back in October of 2022.
The program also offers many sessions accredited by the UBC Continuous Professional Development program, earning Continuous Medical Education credits for practicing physicians and medical staff.
“The IH simulation program originally started in 2009 and didn’t support some of our centers in Interior Health and so as we saw the need for simulation, it’s absolutely exploded since 2015, including opening up the center in Penticton,” said Holmes.
Holmes went on to say that Interior Health has received a lot of positive feedback from students and staff who have participated in simulations.
“The majority of the time what you hear is, I attended a session in which I was shown how to manage a pediatric patient who was in desperate need of airway support so they weren’t able to breathe and we reviewed how to do this and the environment that the educator created was so safe and supportive,” added Holmes.
“Not weeks later, and it often happens this way, they had a patient show up with the same issues and the staff and physicians knew how to care for that patient and really relied back on those skills learned in simulation.”
In addition to the new Penticton centre, Interior Health has the Pritchard Simulation Centre in Kelowna, the Rae Fawcett Simulation Centre in Kamloops, the Kootenay Boundary Simulation Program in Trail, and the IH Rural Mobile Simulation Program that travels to 29 rural and regional sites.
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