[Text on screen: Sheryl Pfeil, MD
Medical Director
Clinical Skills Education Assessment Center]

Speaker Sheryl Pfeil, MD: We have a really exciting space here. We're on two different levels or two different floors. The space you're seeing here is our technical floor. But as a student, you will have an opportunity to really be in all areas of our 26,000 square feet of simulation space. 

[Image of Prior Hall and Atwell Hall surrounded by the Wexner Medical Center]

Our center is, literally, steps away from our classrooms. And in fact, some of the learning and teaching, if you will, occurs right here. So, it's not only convenient, it's accessible, and it's a very welcoming environment.

We—as we say, at Ohio State, we innovate. And so we are creative, we look to students to bring a lot of ideas forward, and we love to hear those and implement them when we can. Some of the time, the students want to know, like, when do I actually get to come here and use the space? And the answer is, early and often. 

[Video clip of clinical skills practice rooms]

So very early on in the first year, you'll be working within the technical space, but also working with our standardized patients. So these are, if you will, actors who portray patients so that our students can, you know, learn the skills of interacting with patients in a very low stress environment. 

For those of you who are kinesthetic learners, for those of you who are visual learners, this is your space. You will have a chance to see things, to experience things, to really, like, get your hands on things and learn in that way.

[Video clips of students practicing on mannequin patients]

[Text on screen: Jonathan Lipps, MD
Associate Professor-Clinical
Department of Anesthesiology]

Speaker Jonathan Lipps, MD: I think it's important for medical students to get early exposure to physician, not only anesthesiologists, but physicians across the spectrum of specialties and see how the concepts that they're learning actually relate to patient care in real life.

[Text on screen: Lori Meyers, MD
Assistant Professor-Clinical
Department of Anesthesiology]

Speaker Lori Meyers, MD: The physiology labs we do for the Med 1 students, the first year they're here in medical school, they're doing a lot of classroom work at that point, and we bring them into the simulation lab to learn how the things they're learning in their classes translate clinically.

[Video clip of a medical school classroom and simulation lab]

Students get to interact with the simulators, do procedures, and ask us questions about things that we're doing with their clinical experience on that simulator.

Speaker Lipps, MD: For our pulmonary physiology lab, the students actually first encounter our patient as a trauma patient out in our hallway after a bike accident. 

[Video clip of students examining a mannequin seeming to have undergone an accident]

And we first ask them to evaluate the patient's pulmonary function just by observing them, just using their senses. So, how do they look? Listening to the patient, using a stethoscope, and actually putting their hands on the patient, feeling chest rise and chest fall.

Then we follow the patient into the simulated trauma bay, where they will apply monitors on the patient, interpret those monitors, and based on what they see, actually order tests and perform procedures. So, for example, while a first-year medical student likely would not perform an intubation, we actually walk our first-year students through an intubation, which is a pretty advanced procedure. 

[Video clip of student performing intubation on a mannequin]

And they get to see, you know, what is involved in the care for a patient, and how these principles that they're learning in the classroom really apply to real life.

Speaker Pfeil, MD: We exist for learners. Our whole point is, actually, to have an open environment, a low stakes environment, so nobody is harmed in the SIMCenter.

[Video clip of student working with a doctor to perform a test on a mannequin]

We have mannequins, we have task trainers, and we really want students to avail themselves of the resources. So we have student interest groups, for example, that develop sessions, creative sessions, to teach skills to students. 

[Video clips of various types of mannequin test patients]

We have students that come up for independent practice. So they may have a, you know, you may have an in interest in surgery or an interest in endoscopy, in GI, but not really know what it would be like. We have an endoscopy simulator.

[Video clip of endoscopy simulator]

You could schedule some time, come up, and practice with that to see if it's something that, you know, really is what you think it is in terms of your career mapping and career planning and just exploration of what you might want to do in medicine.

Speaker Meyers, MD: Part of the career exploration experience is that we help you decide what specialty you're interested in—what you might want to go into after medical school. So that's why we do these experiences, so that you can practice procedures that you might do in anesthesiology, and then other specialties also let you experience things that you would do in that specialty if you chose it as a profession.

Speaker Pfeil, MD: We have, really, everything you can imagine in terms of learning some of the basic skills so that when you're in the clinical environment, these are familiar skills. Sometimes it's really basic, like learning how to take a blood pressure properly or learning how to examine a heart, we have a Harvey simulator. Other times, it's a lot more sophisticated types of skills. We absolutely encourage students to come and use the center to its full capacity and use it in creative ways.