Mayo Clinic has a state-of-the-art Simulation Center that is a popular and substantive enhancement to the Emergency Medicine Residency curriculum. You benefit from being able to practice and debrief critical scenarios in a high-fidelity, controlled, and safe environment.

These intense learning experiences are fun and educational and will enable you to be at your best with patients in the clinical arena. The encounters are designed to meet several learning objectives, including developing your skills in not only medical knowledge but also interpersonal communication, team leadership, resuscitation dynamics, procedures, and systems-based practice. A team approach is used, where as a junior resident, you are expected to begin the case, and as a senior resident, you are given a chance to grow your abilities in supervision. Frequently we have ED-based nurses, respiratory therapists, pharmacists and other context experts join these sessions to provide a true multidisciplinary and collaborative team effort. This also helps to provide more depth to the post-simulation debriefing, during which you are given direct feedback on your performance, exposed to the most up-to-date literature available, and given tips on how to integrate the art and science of medicine.

A particular favorite teaching format during simulation was developed and published at Mayo Clinic by our Emergency Medicine faculty. These are "LIVE. DIE. REPEAT" cases, where learners are provided opportunities to make mistakes under difficult circumstances, and are then allowed to replay the scenario immediately after receiving a corrective debriefing. This technique is based on deliberate practice and anchors the learning points with subsequent successful care of the patient.

If you have a particular interest in developing simulation expertise during your residency, you will be provided a unique opportunity to attend the Mayo Clinic Simulation Instructor Development: Comprehensive Course for free. You can also work with the Emergency Medicine simulation faculty throughout your PGY-3 year to develop and run cases for your fellow residents.

In addition to our formal simulation center, our department has developed a Just-in-Time clinical training area. In this area, we have several airway mannequins, a dedicated institutional airway cart, and GlideScope and C-Mac video laryngoscopy systems to practice your airway skills. Lumbar puncture trainers, Chest Tube/Pigtail trainers, as well as all of our departmental procedural kits allow for Just-in-Time review of procedures prior to performing them on patients or practice after the fact to hone skills and improve performance. This space is available 24/7 to all learners.

In 2021, the graduate school also developed a Procedural Skills Mastery Lab located just below our ED with a myriad of resources that you can use in drop-in fashion to develop and master core procedural skills. The Mastery Lab’s focus is on mastery of the procedural skills. For example, procedures such as practicing suture skills, practicing central line placement, ECMO training, paracentesis, thoracentesis, and more. They can accommodate any request that is focused on practicing procedural skills.