I was in Oklahoma City last week on May 24-25, 2011 for the 5th Annual Oklahoma Health Care Work Force Simulation Conference. This year’s theme was “Training as a Patient Care Team”. My talk titled Leveraging the Potential of Game-Based Learning for Clinical Education focused on the pedagogy of game-based learning and why multi-media tools like virtual environments and video games are becoming an important tool for clinical education, particularly multi-professional training opportunities that encompass all of the clinical disciplines that make up a patient care team.
This conference, in its 5th year is exceptionally well run. Shayla Austin, the Oklahoma Health Care Workforce Center Project Coordinator and Jim Durban, the Executive Director are both passionate about their mission. The Center aims to develop short and long term strategies to alleviate Oklahoma’s health care worker shortages. Both Austin and Durbin were wonderful hosts and I was delighted to be able to participate as a speaker at the conference. My colleague Kim Leighton, PhD, RN, Associate Dean for Technology at BryanLGH College of Health Sciences also presented at this conference on using simulation for multi-disciplinary clinical education.
This experience was a bit of an adventure, but well worth the effort. As many will recall a tornado swept through the Oklahoma City metropolitan area on May 24th, coincidentally as my flight was making its approach to the Oklahoma City airport. We were quickly diverted to the Tulsa airport, “deplaned” and given emergency shelter information by the Delta gate agent. About 45 minutes later we were all quickly “re-planed” as the tornado had taken a turn towards Tulsa. No matter, a safe arrival in Oklahoma City and a great adventure and wonderful experience.