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. In particular, simulation is a great place to practice at the next level of training, so you are always developing new skills. Frequently, we have emergency department-based nurses and pharmacists, as well as other context experts, join these sessions to provide a true multidisciplinary and collaborative team effort. This also helps to provide depth to the post-simulation debriefing, during which you are given direct feedback on your performance and given tips on how to integrate the art and science of medicine. Additionally, we utilize the simulation curriculum to assist with board exam preparation.

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 and PGY-4 years 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 and a dedicated institutional airway cart 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 emergency department with a myriad of resources that you can use in a 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, and more.