HealthPartners underway with $5.1 million expansion of Regions Hospital simulation center in St. Paul

Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press
·3 min read

At Regions Hospital in downtown St. Paul, an aging suit allows doctors and nurses to add years to their limbs and senses, with adjustable settings so knees knock, fingers tremble and vision blurs.

The suit — which can even be set to simulate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease — isn’t the only training apparatus in the HealthPartners Institute’s Clinical Simulation Center, which is using 3D printers to allow surgeons to thumb the printed replica of a tumor before they put patients under the knife.

There are 3D headsets, though the center is still studying which vendors offer the most appropriate training videos for that device, and computerized mannequins, a modern upgrade of a longstanding stand-in for patients in distress.

Roleplaying workshops allow physicians to practice de-escalation techniques on a visitor threatening violence, or deal with a patient or co-worker spouting racism.

“It’s really matching what the airline industry and other high-stakes industries have done throughout the U.S. and internationally,” said Ryan Aga, systemwide director of clinical simulation for HealthPartners. “In the plane industry, it’s filling the cockpit full of smoke. How do we evacuate people? How do we get people out? We’re really one of the last high-stakes industries to fully embed simulation into our training platform.”

Expanding

On the seventh floor of Region’s Hospital, HealthPartners’ Clinical Simulation Center is one of the largest of its kind in Minnesota, if not the Midwest, and it’s about to expand. Construction is already underway on a larger center on the hospital’s first floor that could open by August, made possible in part by a $2.5 million donation from the Otto Bremer Trust in St. Paul, one of the state’s oldest charities.

“We’re proud to be a part of this innovative project and hope others will be inspired to contribute,” said Charlotte Johnson, an Otto Bremer Trust trustee, in a statement.

The overall goal is to raise $5.1 million in philanthropic backing for 7,000 square feet of new workspace. The seventh-floor location will revert to clinical care.

Since its inception around 2007, the center — the first of its kind in Minnesota to be accredited by the Society for Simulation in Healthcare — has drawn trained physicians, medical and nursing students, emergency medicine and fire department personnel and even high school students exploring health careers. That adds up to some 8,000 people annually.

“It’s not new,” said Aga, but given how quickly technology is advancing, “we’ve continued to mature. From a care-delivery perspective, we are the largest (in Minnesota).”

Dr. Benoit Blondeau, a trauma surgeon who chairs the surgery department at Regions Hospital, said the center will include the exact replica of the trauma resuscitation room at Regions, with the goal of training interprofessional teams across disciplines to work together, debrief and prepare for doing the same in a live environment.

A safe space to make mistakes

In medical care, said Blondeau, there’s always room to improve and more to learn. A simulation room offers a safe space to make mistakes.

“This is an essential tool for the training of old and new surgeons,” Blondeau said. “Studies show we have safer planes now because people know how to behave, not only as individual pilots but as members of a team … in stressful situations. We don’t have the time during our (medical school) training to be dealing with every potential situation.”

“I know what to do if someone has had a cardiac arrest, because I’ve seen my failures on a mannequin,” he added. “We allow them to fail on the mannequin … and then we work on each stage of my performance, to understand where the problem was.”

In addition to Regions Hospital, HealthPartners maintains a simulation center at Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, as well as a mobile program that serves all eight hospitals in its care system, as well as dental clinics. Systemwide, clinical simulation is run by a team of 10 professionals and is hiring three more.

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