Building Healthy Relationships through Peer Review in Simulation Education

Simulation as a methodology for education has been active in our setting for ten years. Our Simulation Center is a partnership between a large multi-site healthcare system, a school of nursing and medicine located in an urban setting that is rich with academic and clinical excellence. We began primarily with School of Medicine events related to the Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE) and expanded to include School of Nursing multidisciplinary cases, healthcare professional cases and in more recent years interprofessional events. As leadership and governance for the Simulation Center has evolved so has our quest for quality and excellence in education. As faculty and educators have become comfortable with simulation and the number of events has grown over the past several years it became evident that it was time to take our quality review to the next level. That required us to evaluate whether the events at the Center were creating an experience where learners can apply knowledge, skills, and attitudes in a safe learning environment. It is our mission to develop, apply, and share the best practice in healthcare simulation education. A Simulation Center Education Team was formed with a representative from each partner. A review form, a letter of our intent to peer review and a tool to communicate summative feedback on the event being reviewed was developed by the team. We team as pairs between disciplines when we review and we confer on our feedback when developing our SBAR of the event in preparation for sharing at our Simulation Center Education Team meeting held monthly. There are events occurring every week and many are repetitive which allows a variety of reviewers to observe and collate input. We discuss our review and refine our feedback into a summative review form that is distributed to the event facilitator. The response to our peer review and subsequent feedback has been varied and as we continue to provide feedback we hope to see revisions based upon or recommendations. The peer review aspect of our program is one of our steps to a journey of excellence as we seek accreditation as a center through the Society for Simulation in Healthcare.