Training on the Job with Simulations

Medical emergencies involving newborns and small children are fairly rare at rural Minnesota hospitals. Doctors, nurses, and paramedics don’t get a lot of practice responding to them. For the past two years, however, they have been able to work as teams on a wide variety of pediatric and neonatal emergencies in much the same way that pilots learn to cope with aviation snafus in flight simulators.

The small-town medicos don’t travel to the simulator. It comes to them, in the form of a 40-foot bus operated by Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota. Equipped with computerized mannequins and other technology, the “Sim Bus” travels to community hospitals around the state, presenting medical teams with any number of sudden, life-or-death situations.

This level of training sophistication actually is late in coming to the health care profession, says nurse Karen Mathias, director of the Children’s Simulation Center. “A lot of industries have had opportunities for computerized simulation training for years,” she says. “In health care, we used oranges to practice giving injections. Otherwise, we used live patients.”

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Workers at Hearth & Home’s factory in Lake City learn to spray-paint parts for gas fireplaces by using a head-mounted display and goggles to see virtual parts in a virtual paint booth. They hold and manipulate a modified version of a real spray gun to apply virtual paint. The “immersive” virtual-reality system—and its counterparts for automotive painting and other applications—was created by the Johnson Center for Simulation at Pine Technical College in Pine City.

“We can simulate the painting operation quite convincingly,” says Center Director John Heckman. And the learner gets very precise feedback. For instance, Heckman says, “We show the thickness of the virtual coating by using color. When the [painted object] turns red, it means they’ve applied too much.”

Grantors, such as the Minnesota Job Skills Partnership, fund most of the Johnson Center’s work. Heckman says the center has completed eight or nine “major” virtual reality projects, which he defines as those with funding of more than $100,000, and about 20 smaller ones. They teach skills including welding, parts inspection, and medical-device assembly.

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At Cargill and Taylor Companies, not to mention business schools around the state (and around the world), managers and would-be managers have competed in teams to run simulated companies and business units. The computer-enabled “games” teach on topics ranging from leadership and ethics to project management and finance. The decisions that players make—about everything from production to human resources—determine the success of their companies over virtual weeks, months, or years.