Simulation Education in Emergency Medical Services for Children

Simulation has been utilized as a training method for nearly 80 years by the aviation industry to improve pilots' skills and enhance the teamwork of the flight crew. Within the medical profession, simulation techniques have been used extensively by anesthesiologists for individual and teamwork training tasks. Following the example in anesthesiology, simulation curricula are being developed for teaching and evaluating core competencies for surgical and emergency medicine residents, prehospital personnel, and medical students. Simulation models can be as simple as static mannequins for procedural skills or as complex as high-fidelity human patient simulators that react physiologically to administered medications and provider actions. As this technology continues to mature, benefits of incorporating such safe and valuable education to trainees across all medical disciplines and training levels must be considered in light of the expense of such endeavors. Benefits of simulation training within the medical field include learning and perfecting procedural skills before patient interaction, participating in rare or complicated case scenarios which might otherwise not be encountered in traditional training, and nonprocedural training such as teamwork training and disaster management skills. As efforts continue to emerge to increase patient safety and reduce medical errors, simulation has become more popular in promoting patient autonomy while allowing trainees to experience positive and negative outcomes with the opportunity for constructive feedback, or debriefing, afterward.