Health care is a quickly evolving field with large amounts of new information about human health and methods of treatment discovered daily. It strives to meet society’s demands. All health care providers are expected to be life-long learners. Ever-increasing complexity of knowledge requires specialization and working in teams to fully utilize all the advances in health science. Interprofessional education (IPE) is developed to prepare future providers for collaborative practice which expects health care providers to teach each other and learn from each other. Patients are considered members of health care teams. They need to be educated and be learned from. Teaching has always been one of the implied physician’s responsibilities. As the information exchange among health care providers and patients increases, health care cannot any more rely on the empiric self-discovered ways of knowledge exchange. It has become imperative that providers become competent educators. To achieve this goal, University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine (USD SSOM) has developed the Simulation Academy (SA) elective program for all educators involved in simulation-based education. The program provides a theoretical foundation followed by practice teaching medical and other health care students.
As a pre-requisite for beginning teaching activities, all faculty are asked to complete the didactic modules included in this website and to pass a multiple-choice quiz in the end of each module. Prior to the teaching activity educators are provided with all activity related documentation that includes patient's scritps, scenario descriptions, flowcharts, learning objectives, teaching plans, assessment instruments, and reference materials. On the day of the activity, educators and teaching faculty review the content of the session, teaching methods, and debriefing points.
We hope educators find the provided material informative and useful.