How I Sim – Victoria Brazil

This is the first guest contribution in our initiative "How I Sim" - a series that brings forth the voices of healthcare simulation for a speed round on their thoughts on sim. Who better to kick it off than Victoria Brazil (@Socratic_EM), a true #FOAMsim legend!

How I Sim (2)

Our very first guest contributor to the “How I Sim” series needs little introduction. She is an extraordinary educator, a fabulous female of FOAM, a SMACC Super Star and a person with cognition skills the rest of us can’t even imagine being in possession of. It is, of course, Victoria Brazil.

She tweets at @SocraticEM and for me Vic has been a great inspiration. Both professionally and on a personal level.

She exhibits truly impressive poise and command whether debriefing, teaching or talking and I’m sure most of you will have your own favorite “Vic-moments”.

/Sandra

 

“How I Sim”

Name

Victoria Brazil

Location

Gold Coast Australia

Current job

Director of Clinical Simulation, Bond University and Emergency Physician, Gold Coast Health

One sentence to describe your sim recently

  • Immersed in research and literature review !

Favorite topics in sim

  • Using sim for quality improvement. Embedded sim in hospital quality processes.
  • OK,…. gadgets too :-)

Current sim project(s)

  • Try to build a research program that builds on our operational simulation work on the Gold Coast
  • Best practices in debriefing for in situ sim
  • Simulcast ! (follow us on twitter)

How I see simulation scenarios

  • Simple and SLOW. The ‘tempo’ of scenarios is not discussed enough.
  • Well targeted at the precise outcomes desired, and the right balance in discipline sticking to that, but well-judged flexibility to change.
  • I like the ‘functional task alignment’, rather than fidelity, as per Chris Hicks and Jesse Spur.
  • Stopped at the right time. I use “Have we got what we need for the debrief?”

How I see debriefing

  • Structured, but without a rigid ‘recipe’.
  • An important connection with real patient care – ‘facilitated reflection’.
  • Psychologically safe – easy to say – hard to create and maintain – respect, trust, positive regard.
  • Exploring rationale for observed behaviors, but still keeping the time and focus tight.
  • “Thinking on your feet” as per Kristian Krogh – using values, artistry and core techniques, while continuing own development.
  • Important to seek and provide feedback with co-debriefer – encourages our own skills and culture in those honest, ‘direct AND nice’ conversations.

Simulation in the future

  • I’m an optimist!
  • Increasingly embedded in practice, quality improvement and education and training. But embedded appropriately for objective targeted and where the cost benefit is appropriate.
  • Educators, clinicians and administrators ‘pulling’ sim into their work with expert input from simulation experts.

Your advice to any new sim’er

  • Be clear on what you want to do before trying to decide how to do it.
  • You can do anything, but not everything.

Your mantra

  • “So what are you actually trying to do?”

 

Nominations

I would like to nominate these three great educators in #FOAMsim:

  • Jenny Rudolph (@GetCuriousNow) – surely needs no introduction in the sim world
  • Walter Eppich (@LearnThruTalk) – one of the smartest folks I know – debriefing guru, and teaching us how to use lessons from sim to learn more from practice
  • Gabriel Reedy (@gabereedy) – from Sailcentre in the UK. Not afraid to challenge dogma

Star skater, simulationista by day, anaesthesia by night and #meded choreographer. Coming to a SIM room near you. With a shark.

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Fredrik Granholm
Guest
8 years ago

Great start for the “How I sim” series! Nice that you embedded links to papers and more information. If there will be some added questions for future sim people I would like to know 1: Favourite/Most important paper in medsim ? 2: Book recommendation on sim/human factors/performance
etc

Thanks!
Fredrik
@TotalResus