Abstract
The staff of Jackson Memorial Hospital Patient Safety Center at the University of Miami in Miami Florida, USA, did a road trip. They drove from downtown Miami to Miami Beach (10 minutes, even with traffic). But it was still unforgettable for them. This chapter attempts to draw some lessons out of this journey. Planning is most important. Before embarking on your own simulator road trip, you have to decide what the thing is, i.e., what are your goals and objectives. Why are you doing this simulation? Who is your audience? What is your audience expecting to take away from the simulation? Then next step is, as the chapter demonstrates, to create a scenario that fits into the road trip. The staff narrate in their own words, “We need thinking, instructing, sentient creatures to make the simulation scene come to life. So we plucked the best and brightest from our attending staff. We produced the simulations on a Saturday and Sunday. Each day, we had three attendings. These attendings were familiar with simulation scenarios, the computer that ran the simulators, ‘faking it’ when glitches happened so that the ‘audience’ never perceive the glitches (this is the attribute most essential to any simulator instructor), and debriefing people after the scenario. Each of these instructors had worked with these simulators before and had worked with residents or medical students in a simulator setting. Experience counts.”