Clinical Simulation Center

Clinical Simulation Center

Overview

Improving healthcare and patient safety through advanced healthcare simulation

Human and Financial
Costs of Medical Error

Patient Safety Principle #5:
Create a Learning Environment

More people die in a given year as a result of medical errors than from motor vehicle accidents (43,458), breast cancer (42,297), or AIDS (16,516)  Total national costs…are estimated to be between $17 billion and $29 billion, of which health care costs represent over one-half.

Use simulations whenever possible; encourage reporting of errors and hazardous conditions; ensure no reprisals for reporting of errors; develop a working culture in which communication flows freely regardless of authority gradient; implement mechanisms of feedback and learning from error.

To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System
(Institute of Medicine 2000: Pp. 1-2; 178)

Effective clinical education will increasingly require innovative approaches and greater collaboration with the wider community. Patient safety, the reduction of medical error, and enhance healthcare quality have become major pubic policy issues. Simulation is a proven and effective tool for training, performance evaluation and research. Charles Drew University has made a major commitment to simulation training.
Traditionally, complex clinical skills are learned “on the fly” with little time for practice and feedback. Societal pressures, including cost-containment and patient safety issues, will increasingly preclude the use of real patients, especially ill ones, in hands-on medical education and training.  Actual clinical crises are suboptimal learning opportunities because there are unpredictable, each event is unique, it lends itself to a very small room for error, and improper treatment can have tragic consequences.