The UT Health Science Campus Interprofessional Immersive Simulation CenterTM (IISCTM) effectively manages and schedules training facilities, classrooms and simulation equipment to turn out some of the best-educated healthcare professionals in the US
The Health Science Campus at the University of Toledo is home to the UT Medical Center hospital and clinics, as well as many of UT’s health-science research and education programmes. The Health Science Campus strives to provide compassionate and cost-effective patient care while serving as a diverse, student-centred public research university with an over-arching goal of The University of Toledo to ‘Improve the human condition’.
The IISCTM is a 12,000 sq ft training facility located on The University of Toledo’s Health Science Campus. This facility is designed to train all levels of healthcare professionals and students and incorporate interprofessional collaboration.
Ben Stobbe, Administrative Director & Business Manager of the IISCTM, was determined to improve the scheduling andmanagement of the facility, and he thought back to how he implemented this at another similar simulation training centre environment in which he worked.
Stobbe had a feeling that what worked so well at his previous job – the web-based room and resource scheduling solution from NFS called Rendezvous – would work equally well for the IISCTM.
At UT, Stobbe wanted to move away from using printed paper copies for the scheduling process, improve internal communications among the scheduling team and simplify the way that people made scheduling requests and invited attendees. He leaned on the NFS Professional Services team to provide best-practices guidance on this, and back it up with solid technology.
The UT- IISCTM has training facilities, classrooms and simulation equipment, all of which are in use constantly in order to turn out some of the best-educated medical students in the country.
Natalie Appleton, Head of US Operations at NFS, says, “Stobbe particularly liked the fact that the simulation equipment could be effectively managed and scheduled in one system, alongside the more typical meeting and classroom space.”
The simulation equipment is used by multiple healthcare students to help them train and provide a life-like experience as they learn to perform clinical procedures, such as taking accurate blood pressure readings, putting an IV in an arm, giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or even performing surgery.
Since Rendezvous has the ability to manage any type of space as well as any type of resource, Stobbe and his colleagues felt it was flexible enough to support their unique equipment and set-up requirements. In fact, it was just a simple matter of configuring the simulation equipment into the Rendezvous database so that it could be scheduled for use as needed.
Granular user rights, business rules and other parameters can be put in place in Rendezvous in order to support the internal business processes and scheduling environment that best suits the Health Science Campus. UT’s faculty, staff and students will use the Self-Service module which allows them to request simulation equipment, along with training rooms and other space and resources available to them.
“Management and utilisation reports will be critical to ensure the efficient use of the IISCTM facilities and resources,” comments Natalie. “Standard reports within Rendezvous, along with a query tool, will guarantee that Stobbe’s team can easily access the data they need in order to make informed decisions about their facilities.”
The IISCTM also looks forward to a speedy return on investment, with the Rendezvous system expected to pay for itself twelve times over within just the first year of use.