A 45,000-square-foot building under construction at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) could change the way healthcare education is delivered in Tennessee.
When the new $36.7 million Interprofessional Simulation and Patient Safety Center opens in 2017, it will be one of the largest free-standing buildings in the country dedicated solely to healthcare simulation and interprofessional education.
The center will allow students from all six colleges at UTHSC -- Dentistry, Graduate Health Sciences, Health Professions, Nursing, Pharmacy, Medicine -- to train together in simulation settings to provide team-based care, the model for quality healthcare delivery.
A UTHSC official said that by using high-tech manikins, standardized patients (actors trained to portray patients with a variety of conditions), and roughly $4.5 million in the latest audio-visual equipment and computers, “we will offer state-of-the-art training under the safest conditions possible.”
“Healthcare simulation epitomizes everything we know about adult learning theory – adults learn by doing, learn best by focusing on problems, and want guidance,” said Chad Epps, MD, executive director of Healthcare Simulation at UTHSC. “It’s a perfect fit.”
Epps, the president of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare and past chair of the Council on Accreditation of Healthcare Simulation Programs, will be the first to lead academic programs in the new building, which will also offer training for UTHSC’s clinical partners and continuing education opportunities for health care practitioners.
He has been a consultant on the building since January. “
My vision for the building is to create a program by which we work with our students and our clinical partners to make patient care safer,” he said. “That’s the bottom line. It’s about creating healthcare workers who provide better care and improve patient safety.”
Each floor of the three-story building will be dedicated to a different aspect of simulation training, he said. The first floor includes bed-skill stations that will allow students to focus on preclinical skills and assessments. There will also be a simulated home environment, where students can practice delivering in-home patient care.
The second floor will house a simulated acute care setting resembling a hospital environment with patient rooms and variety of manikins that can simulate everything from surgery to labor and delivery.
The third floor will house the standardized patient program. It will include 24 patient exam rooms, as well as clinical lab space and a community pharmacy setting.
The building is the brainchild of Ken Brown, executive vice chancellor and chief operations officer at UTHSC, who envisioned it as an opportunity for UTHSC to stand out among academic health science centers for providing the best possible education for students across the disciplines.
