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Welcome to Becker's Health Care Podcast. I'm Mariah
Taylor, assistant editor, and I'm thrilled to be
interviewing Whitney Smith, simulation program manager at Children's
Hospital Colorado on the podcast today. Whitney, thank
you so much for joining me. I'm so
for this conversation because what a fun initiative
The Sims Wars is. So I can't wait
to get into everything you're doing there. But
before we dive in, I'm gonna turn it
over to you to introduce yourself and tell
us a little bit more about your background.
Thank you so much, Mariah. My name is
Whitney Smith, as you said. You so eloquently
introduced me and I appreciate that.
Happy to be here to talk about just
one of the many initiatives that we have
going on at Children's Hospital Colorado
to increase the engagement of our staff, to
celebrate all of the hard work that they
constantly do,
to be prepared for the patients that they
take care of on a daily basis.
And, I I'm just really glad glad to
be here and to celebrate our staff.
Amazing.
Let's dive into
what are the sim wars. Can you tell
me a little bit about what happens at
these events and who participates?
Happy to. So my first sim wars
was in 2017.
I actually saw something like this
at a conference at the International
Healthcare Simulation
Conference in Los Angeles. And it was a
demonstration of how sim wars
can be used to,
have a competition
but also have a little bit of an
edutainment
is what they use. And we sort of
stole that
term from the
first people that did this. And we modeled
this after something
that Doctor. Haru
Okuda did and some of his colleagues. He
actually published a book on how to incorporate
sim wars
in mostly residential or residents, pediatric residents, emergency
residents, that sort of thing in the academic
center
where they could hone in on their, their
simulation skills in a competitive environment and make
it fun at the same time. But we
thought we could take this to a whole
new level at Children's Colorado
and
we incorporated,
themes and costumes, children's friendly
type,
themes. In fact, this year we actually did
fairy tales and it it really allows our
teams to be creative and innovative in how
they're approaching
teamwork and,
creativity when they're bringing it to the stage.
So it's a lot of fun. So we
thought, you know, there's so many things that
we could do with this as an organization.
And originally we wanted to use this to
socialize our program.
So many of us know that simulation is
a valuable tool and it has a very
direct impact on
improving our patient outcomes. In fact, it translates
directly
what we see at the clinical level,
but how can we make sure that on
an organizational
level,
our executives,
our,
our team members that may not have
access,
maybe we're spread out because we're at a,
a very small center within Children's Colorado. Maybe
they just don't know all of the different
things that simulation can offer them to help
improve patient care.
So that was the original intent to, to
bring people together
to highlight some of the great work that
our team members are already doing and preparing
all throughout the year to do a good
job with patient care. How can we do
that even better? And so we brought people
together. We made it an event
and we wanted it to be fun. We
wanted to
encourage innovation
and creativity,
and we wanted to to celebrate and have
an opportunity for people to,
just to relax,
laugh, be
together for once. It's just been a very
difficult post pandemic for all of our team
members in healthcare. And we thought this could
be a great celebration of what we're we're
doing so well. And it turned into so
much more than that.
We are using it now to
increase our program recognition,
the recognition
of our program in the hospital.
We're even seeing that our team members are,
getting even more engaged early on all throughout
the year because they're looking forward to this
event.
And, we're seeing just a really high level
increase in our organizational support. And it's been
very surprising. We
are using this to
really look at all of these different tangible
and intangible benefits
that an event like this
could have for a simulation program and also
for the organization.
Amazing.
Now if I understand correctly, you just completed
this year's SIM wars. Correct?
That is right. This was our 3rd event
that we've we've hosted and it just went
smashingly. We had an auditorium
full of
team members, members from our wonderful foundation and
our donors. We had members from the quality
board. We even had the president of our
hospital
serve as one of our actors and our
CMO
and CNO. It's just
it's been,
very, very rewarding to see everybody come together.
And there's goosebumps had by all. I promise
you.
And I understand that, there's teams in these
Sims events, and there's some kind of a
prize they can win. So can you talk
a little bit more about
what like, how that functioned
and what that prize was?
I sure can. So
this event that we that we host is
approximately an hour and a half long. So
we had to really think hard about
the number of teams that could compete.
And we weren't quite sure how that was
going to happen when we first pulled off
this event when we did it for the
first time in 2019.
But it's worked out really well. And initially
it was our critical care teams from
our pediatric intensive care, our cardiac intensive care.
We had members from our emergency department and
our pediatric emergency department.
And,
our flight team was also highlighted
originally.
And this year it's grown even more to
include people that haven't done simulation on an
organized level
that we knew about until now. And that
was our neonatal intensive cares. And so we
had
our neonatal intensive care from our Ann Chutes
Medical Campus
and we had representatives from our neonatal intensive
care at our Colorado Springs Campus. And this
was really huge for us because
we really wanted to use this,
as I said before, to socialize the program
but also to improve and increase the access
all throughout the organization. So Colorado Springs is
part of our organization but it's 45 minutes
away from the Denver metro area. And it's
always been a challenge
in anything you do to make sure
different areas are included. So this was monumental
for us. So this year in 20,
24, our organization
had or our sim wars had representatives from
the CICU as I said before,
the PICU who was our returning champions this
year
and 2 of our neonatal intensive care units.
And so that was really great and it
worked out great because
our guest moderator
was, a neonatologist
herself from immersive designs from Boston Children's Hospital,
Doctor. Jennifer Arnold, and she was our guest
moderator who just helped keep the party going.
And as a simulationist herself,
she understood how important it was that simulation
was really highlighted as an impactful tool for
clinical education and for patient outcomes improvement.
Amazing. Let's dive a little bit more into
that. What are some of the patient and
staff outcomes from this event?
This,
this is a great question and it's something
that I I love to highlight for people
who may not understand
that it's more than just
an event where people are having fun. So
I mentioned before the intangible and the tangible.
Right off the bat, the, team member engagement
was one of the biggest,
things that we could measure. We went from
maybe 75
people filling our auditorium
to over 250
people attending this event in person and also
virtually. So a virtual
option for folks who are all throughout the
region in our organization
was pretty key to make this successful.
And,
having the increased engagement
showed itself in different
ways following the event. So we had, people
communicating to me following the event, wanting to
get involved, folks who are part of multidisciplinary
team
that really want to use simulation to improve
what they're doing as a team and to
help their patient outcomes.
For example, I was contacted for
more simulation,
experience
for our south campus,
our north campus,
our perioperative
environment, this is huge because,
this is groups that,
really
love simulation and they value simulation, but they
just really didn't know how to go about
doing it in an organized way. So that
was great.
The very first year that we did this
when we had someone in the audience from
our foundation,
just by chance someone was there. And it
resulted after a few more meetings in a
$550,000
grant from the from a donor through our
foundation, through the Society 2221 Society.
And, that went so far into helping expand
our program
and it has really helped us,
pave the way for
looking into
expanding our physical center where we're looking now
into,
having a new learning center built and designed,
which is helping our whole program
itself in expanding. So,
as our program expands, we know that we
need a more
physical capacity to expand with that, and that
just led right into
the pathway that we're looking at. So that
was really exciting.
The engagement from our C suite. So that's
kind of a big thing too because one
of the things that socializing
our program has led to is an increased
partnership in patient safety initiatives
where we're doing more operational readiness simulations
and, in situ simulations where we're doing simulations
in the clinical environment.
And,
just having people know that the simulation program
exists
leads directly to some of those projects where
if there's
new, program expansions
throughout the organization
or
if there's new
process and policies that are being implemented,
people now know about us not just because
of simulation
and sym wars, but because somebody might have
known someone that attended sym wars and they
knew about our program because we do highlight
some of those,
initiatives that we're doing during sym wars. So
it's sort of like a PR event for
us really. And that's what we use this,
use this for in the end is really
highlighting those patient safety initiatives that can be
impacted
by simulation.
Cool. Now
it sounds like a super fun event. You've
talked about some of the great outcomes that
come from it. So if there are systems
out there that would like to try something
like this in their own facilities, what advice
do you have about getting started?
Well, I would definitely say don't reinvent the
wheel. So a version of SIM wars
is being conducted
in different areas all throughout the nation. But
if you want to do something like Children's
Colorado did with SIM wars and take it
to a whole new level,
then feel free to reach out to me.
There's so there's so many things that I
and our team could offer so that you
don't have to do this
on your own. And it really is a
stepwise process.
The first thing would say that helped us
be successful is bringing
a team of partners that already do things
simulation wise with you, but making sure that
those partners,
are willing to be engaged and think outside
the box, be creative, be innovative,
and really push the limits of what could
be done
when it comes to simulation
and a production.
And, we put those people together in a
steering committee. So we had about
15 or 20 people as part of the
steering committee that started planning well
into
maybe
6 months to 9 months
prior to the event. And so
part of that steering committee are people that
are gonna talk this up and be creative
and help design scenarios that work with the
teams on stage
with the mannequins that we have and how
the theme
works with costumes
and incorporate music and all different types of
things that we could do. But making sure
that you have a large team
that really wants to do that. So having
a steering committee is really,
my first
piece of advice. There is a published book
that Doctor. Acuda
has out there on sim wars. So if
you're interested in looking at the
the the structure of sim wars when it
comes to how do you have a grading
rubric or
how do you utilize
judges
and,
balance that with an,
master of ceremonies,
a moderator
and judges, and engage the audience at the
same time. There's an art to that, and
you can get a lot of that information
from a lot of different things that are
published.
But feel free to reach out to me
and, you could even see some of the
ways that we did that on the videos
that we've put on LinkedIn and on our
Facebook page through Children's Colorado.
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining
me on the podcast today, Whitney. This is
such a fun initiative, and I hope to
see more from Sim Wars in the coming
years.
If you are looking to catch more,
interesting initiatives, then consider coming to our clinical
leadership forum at the Becker CEO and CFO
roundtable, November 11th through 14th in Chicago. We
have limited space available for attendees and sponsors,
so contact us at agenda team atbeckershealthcare.com
to learn more.