Calgary's new medical simulation lab helps health-care professionals improve their skills

A new Calgary simulation lab is using life-like mannequins and recreating urgent emergency situations so doctors can practice, perform and improve their medical skills to save lives. 

The Educate, Simulate, Innovate and Motivate (eSIM) lab opened at the Peter Lougheed Centre on Thursday, helping different health-care professionals improve their hands-on response to events like cardiac arrest, asthma attacks, anaphylactic shock and even child-birth.

"A hospital is just a building and equipment is just equipment, but what really makes or breaks quality safe health care is the teams, that’s where the magic is found, to get in sync with each other," said simulation consultant Hanin Omar.

"In the last couple of months, we’ve been practicing these types of events and I’ve heard from some of our learners who actually faced these situations in real life afterwards and knew exactly what to do."

The mannequins range from infants to geriatric patients.

Each one can simulate vital signs, breathing, coughing, bleeding and sweating, and can even have short conversations with doctors through computerized audio. 

Clinical nurse educator Nicole Rogi is one of the health-care professionals who regularly uses simulation equipment to guide others through simulations.

Medical mannequins can be seen at the Peter Lougheed Centre's new eSIM lab on Thursday, April 4, 2024.She says the real benefit comes from a full classroom debrief following the exercise, which allows first responders to find out what they did correctly or what strategies could be improved on.

"We’ve done everything from cardiac arrests, which is what we call a Code Blue in hospital, all the way to narcotic overdoses by injecting Narcan," Rogi said.

"What I like about simulation is that we lower the stress for the learners, so they're able to just have those key takeaway points that we’ve been teaching. It becomes a really safe place to learn with the pre-briefs and debriefs."

Simulation technologist Dan Duperron works behind the scenes to program the mannequins and simulate medical situations. 

He helps by showing health-care workers real time data, including how effective their chest compressions are, during the exercise.

"We can control many aspects of the simulator from their respiratory pattern to the ECG vitals. We can do streaming audio, we can control their eyes movements, their blinking and many functionalities," he said.

"These are all great teaching devices, and we can do real-time feedback, so they have CPR feedback, or we can monitor that in real time and use that during the debriefing."

Medical mannequins can be seen at the Peter Lougheed Centre's new eSIM lab on Thursday, April 4, 2024.Alberta now has 14 eSIM labs, which are primarily based in all of the larger hospitals throughout the province, but mobile rural simulations are also being used to support educators and health-care teams in more remote locations.

Director of the provincial eSIM program Jason Laberge says the new and larger purpose-built simulation lab at the Peter Lougheed Centre will go a long way to improving patient outcomes and ultimately saving lives.

"Being able to provide this kind of service and this kind of support for our teams is incredibly rewarding," he said.