Welcome
Letter From The Editor
In this issue we are pleased to bring you the exciting news that Dubai Healthcare City will launch a world-class tertiary care teaching hospital. This story has been developing for several months, as faculty from HMI, health care leaders in Dubai, a team of architects from a top firm, and clinical and administrative experts from throughout the Harvard medical community have worked together to design every component of the University Hospital.
Around Harvard
HMS students on working with a simulator
“Considering that ‘Stan’ is made of plastic, one may wonder how realistic the simulator experience may be. After a few moments of hearing the ‘patient's’ voice (from a faculty member behind a curtain, a la the Wizard of Oz), tracking his vitals, and working with the team to manage the situation, the distinction between simulation and reality begins to blur.”
-- Mark Gromski, second-year
“One of the major benefits of simulation is learning how you respond and think in that environment. When all the first-year students did simulation sessions during the first week of class, nearly every group forgot to even ask the patient's name and age. The realness of the simulation allows us to practice simultaneously engaging in systematic thought and maintaining concern for the patient in a stressful, painful situation. I would have taken my ability to do this for granted until being confronted by my first, unfortunate patient if I did not have the learning opportunity provided by the sim lab.”
“During biochemistry we did a case in which the patient had been exposed to a parasympathetic agonist, and I now remember that material better than anything else we studied in that class. One of the challenges of learning medicine is that material must, of necessity, be taught segmentally. Simulator cases provide a rare opportunity to understand how the discrete, and sometimes scattered, fragments of our education manifest themselves in one human experience.”
-- Brian Bergmark, first-year
“In our first week of medical school, we were thrown in with four other students and a simulated patient who presented in the ER with respiratory distress. We had no idea what to do, and we panicked. I remember having no sense of how much time we had left. You feel your own pulse start to race. Everyone was talking at once. When we ‘paged’ a physician for backup and she asked us the patient's name and age, we realized we had never even asked him. So we turned to the patient, whose O2 stats were dropping precipitously, and all shouted out, "What's your name?" It was as if all common sense flew out the door when we were presented with our first emergency situation where we were in charge.
I remember hearing from older students who took advantage of sim lab that 90% of what they learned in their first year they learned from the simulations, so I knew I wanted to build this into my first year schedule.”
-- Regan Johnson, first-year
“The patient simulator brings the classroom to life. It allows us to go from a lecture on heart failure to seeing the presentation of one unfold before our eyes. This not only helps to solidify concepts but also allows us to better appreciate how integral a deep understanding of physiology really is in settings of acute illness. I believe that the sim lab has allowed me to better integrate lessons learned from diverse organ systems and has helped to prepare me for the case-based clinical presentations present on the USMLE Step 1 exam.”
-- Christopher Miller, second-year
