Welcome to our website. The Mayo Clinic Multidisciplinary Simulation Center represents a living collaborative between all specialties and health care professions at Mayo Clinic, where the needs of the patient come first. It is through this lens - to best serve our patients - that our simulation center works to fully realize the benefits of simulation-based education, practice and research opportunities.

What simulation technology brings to medicine

Simulation is increasingly being used to educate and train physicians and allied health personnel throughout the United States and world. There are a wide array of simulation methods, including patient actors, mannequin human patient simulators, task trainers, and others. These devices are similar in concept to flight simulators, used by the airline industry to train pilots. Emerging medical simulation technologies provide training in a risk-free, supportive environment where the complex nuances of ideal patient care can be identified, re-created, practiced and tested among learners to ensure their highest levels of competency.

Simulation training offers unique and powerful learning opportunities in key competency areas, including communication, teamwork, emergent conditions, leadership, as well as tasks requiring well-practiced manual skills such as diagnostics and surgical procedures.

With simulation technology, we can now create common and unique crisis scenarios, including myocardial infarction, tension pneumothorax, malignant hyperthermia, shock state diagnosis and complex resuscitations, among many others. Monitors show physiologic changes just as they would occur in real patients. Chaos can now be created on demand, and trained within-what a powerful tool for team and individual training in our most difficult settings!

What Mayo Clinic brings to medical simulation

As a leader in integrated, multidisciplinary group practice for over a century, Mayo Clinic is renowned for its team approach to patient care. We are excited to apply our collaborative practice model to explore and advance simulation education in new ways, across specialties and professional roles (physicians, residents and fellows, nurses and health care specialists), to better educate practitioners and strengthen patient care.

We believe medical simulation has important lessons and applications for all involved in the risk-laden environment of health care. We also believe it is imperative that in addition to taking on the mantra of simulation utilization, centers of excellence must rise to the challenges of both "demonstrated competence" and scholarly analysis of efficacy via scientific (including behavioral science) methods.

We hope that through our multidisciplinary simulation center we can collaborate with other institutions to further improve patient care quality and safety for all.

William F. Dunn, MD
Medical Director, Mayo Multidisciplinary Simulation Center
Former Co-Director, Mayo Multidisciplinary Critical Care Fellowship
Associate Professor of Medicine
Mayo Clinic College of Medicine