It’s no secret that thousands, if not millions, of programs worldwide have moved online during the coronavirus pandemic, causing problems especially for healthcare workers. These are problems that the minds behind Simulation in Motion – Iowa, or SIM-IA, have recognized and developed a program to help combat.
SIM-IA is a mobile training program that provides high-quality clinical training to healthcare professionals across the state. The program currently hosts three trucks in Sioux City, Des Moines and Swisher and is in its third year of operation.
The Swisher-based truck was on site at the University of Iowa College of Nursing Homecoming Tailgate Friday afternoon, offering tours and demonstrations.
“We want to reach out and be able to reach everyone who has contact with patient care in any way,” said SIM-IA program director Brian Rechkemmer. “One of our biggest goals is we want to improve patient outcomes in the state of Iowa.”
Rechkemmmer said the program has trained more than 9,000 people in 500 different locations. 97 percent of participants reported feeling an increase in their clinical confidence, and 99 percent found the simulations valuable to their practice.
SIM-IA acquired its first truck in July 2022, Rechkemmer said, after receiving an $8 million grant from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, to cover the costs of the trucks, equipment and first four years of training services, offered free of charge to all EMS providers and critical access hospitals.
Only three other states – South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana – have comparable mobile simulation centers.
Rechkemmer said the program brings training right to people’s front doors, which is a huge benefit of COVID-19 as many people pursued medical training online and did not have the practical skills needed for their profession. Being able to bring training directly to teams eliminates any potential disconnect of information.
“When they send the provider to go do the training, they go and do the training, and then they come back, and they’re expected to do the training for the rest of the department,” Rechkemmer said. “That can be difficult to start the old telephone game. Every time it is retold, it is told differently.”
Cormac O’Sullivan, SIM-IA senior advisor and one of the people who helped create the program, offered tours to participants at the College of Nursing Homecoming tailgate on Friday.
“A lot of rural hospitals don’t have any funding to educate people,” O’Sullivan said. “When we talked to them during the needs assessment, they just didn’t have the money.”
O’Sullivan said much of their training focuses on low-frequency, high-risk situations that rural providers don’t often see. In one scenario, they simulated a mother bleeding after childbirth, and the crew treated the same case later that same evening in a real-life scenario.
RELATED: National telepsychology program across Iowa – The Daily Iowan
“Some of the situations that come up, someone who has had a whole career in healthcare might experience this maybe once,” he said.
Despite the funding challenges, the program has reached every county and has worked with every hospital and ambulance system in Iowa. The goal is to continue to standardize care, improve care and benefit the people of Iowa, but the program must secure new funding sources to do so as the initial grant expires in June.
Terry Wicks, who received his Doctor of Nursing Practice from UI in 2018, is now a faculty member at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, but returned to Iowa City for UI’s homecoming. During his time at UI, O’Sullivan was in the process of applying for the first grant, but Wicks had never been in the truck before.
As a faculty member at UNC-Greensboro, he said the mannequins in the truck perform many of the same functions as the mannequins his students work with in their simulation lab.
“It helps train providers to respond appropriately with the right algorithm to manage the situation,” he said.
Wicks’ mother lives in the rural community of Guttenberg, Iowa, which, in the best of circumstances, is an hour’s drive from the nearest medical center in Dubuque. Wicks said he appreciates the training the program provides to rural health care areas like Guttenberg.
“Those people are not going to experience these types of events – maybe once or twice a decade. So it is critical that they can see, participate in, and be evaluated in the simulation to assess and improve their own performance,” said Wicks.
