Establishing a clinical simulation centre: recommendations from an expert panel from the international conference on advanced clinical simulation, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Establishing a simulation centre remains a real challenge for many experts in the field of clinical simulation. A panel of experts presented some guidelines during the International Conference on Advanced Clinical Simulation that was held in Prince Sultan Military College of Health Sciences, Dhahran, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in October 2014. The round table discussion addressed eight themes: The planning stage, stakeholders' involvement, strategic planning, centre design, partnership development, faculty development, curriculum development and establishing a research strategy. The conclusions are presented in this paper

Implementation of a multi-level evaluation strategy: a case study on a program for international medical graduates / 보건의료교육평가

Evaluation of educational interventions is often focused on immediate and/or short-term metrics associated with knowledge and/or skills acquisition. We developed an educational intervention to support international medical graduates working in rural Victoria. We wanted an evaluation strategy that included participants' reactions and considered transfer of learning to the workplace and retention of learning. However, with participants in distributed locations and limited program resources, this was likely to prove challenging. Elsewhere, we have reported the outcomes of this evaluation. In this educational development report, we describe our evaluation strategy as a case study, its underpinning theoretical framework, the strategy, and its benefits and challenges. The strategy sought to address issues of program structure, process, and outcomes. We used a modified version of Kirkpatrick's model as a framework to map our evaluation of participants' experiences, acquisition of knowledge and skills, and their application in the workplace. The predominant benefit was that most of the evaluation instruments allowed for personalization of the program. The baseline instruments provided a broad view of participants' expectations, needs, and current perspective on their role. Immediate evaluation instruments allowed ongoing tailoring of the program to meet learning needs. Intermediate evaluations facilitated insight on the transfer of learning. The principal challenge related to the resource intensive nature of the evaluation strategy. A dedicated program administrator was required to manage data collection. Although resource-intensive, we recommend baseline, immediate, and intermediate data collection points, with multi-source feedback being especially illuminating. We believe our experiences may be valuable to faculty involved in program evaluations.