YHEM Residency

Dr. Lynn McGowan is the medical director of the Kinsley Family Foundation Medical Simulation Center. She completed both residency and her fellowship in Medical Education with focus on Simulation here at YHEM! Dr. McGowan collaborates closely with hospital leadership to develop innovative teaching models that engage residents through immersive, experiential learning. Her goal is to foster an environment that emphasizes interprofessional collaboration and community engagement, empowering healthcare providers to safely develop and apply their knowledge and skills. Since opening in 2008, over 15,000 learner encounters representing over 130,000 hours of training have occurred in the Simulation Center. Technologies from the simulation center have additionally been utilized off site to assist with emergency response education, wilderness medicine and volunteer projects.

YEAR-DIRECTED: A structured curriculum of simulated clinical scenarios that provides residents with an immersive opportunity to master essential emergency skills and gain a deeper understanding of complex pathologies. Simulation is integrated into the entire longitudinal didactic curriculum such that residents use the simulation center almost every week.
SIMTERNS: A simulated experience that provides emergency medicine interns with firsthand insight into the patient experience at YHED. The intern class is divided into small groups and provided with a unique patient chief complaint. Each group then enters the ED as though they were a patient with family members, and go through processes of triage/registration, bed assignment, nursing/resident/attending eval and management, and lastly disposition. During the debrief, we reflect on the responsibilities of all members of our patient team, as well as the multiple, simultaneous stressors patients encounter navigating their care in the ED.
VAD Workshop: After an introductory lecture series by our interventional cardiologists, EM residents rotate in year-directed small groups to different hands-on stations to learn more about the different types of ventricular assist devices, equipment troubleshooting and management of common VAD complications.
IN-SITU Simulation: Emergency Medicine residents utilize the Simulation Center extensively during weekly conference time for individual and small-group skills training with our task trainers, high-fidelity models and standardized patients. Additionally, our in-situ simulation curriculum integrates patient safety initiatives and enhances interprofessional communication with a focus on the resuscitation of high acuity pediatric and trauma patients. This takes place in one of our ED or Trauma resuscitation rooms. In these training exercises, residents lead a multidisciplinary team of nurses, respiratory therapists, pharmacists and other staff in the emergency department to stabilize and disposition a simulated patient.