Health educators, clinicians, students and technical specialists from institutions across Qatar convened at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q) for a one-day symposium on simulation-based learning.

WCMQ symposium  Simulation-based learning in the medical field uses a variety of teaching aids and techniques to recreate a range of clinical experiences. These are designed to give trainees opportunities to learn the importance of human factors such as effective communication, leadership and teamwork when caring for patients, in addition to teaching aids which support learned mastery of clinical and communication skills, in a safe and controlled environment.

The one-day symposium, hosted and coordinated by the team from the WCM-Q Clinical Skills and Simulation Lab (CSSL), offered a series of six practical workshops, a lecture on life-long learning that emphasised the role of debriefing, and two panel presentations where the presenters discussed the current state of simulation-based education in Qatar. The symposium also unveiled its new ‘Sim Souq’, a networking platform designed to provide opportunities for health educators to meet, share and develop innovative ideas, and hatch collaborative endeavours.

The annual event,which is now in its second year, brought together more than 100 participants from WCM-Q, Hamad Medical Corporation, Sidra Medicine, College of the North Atlantic-Qatar, Qatar University, and the University of Calgary in Qatar.

The symposium featured keynote speaker Dr Ralf Krage, an anaesthesiologist at the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam, Director of the ADAM Simulation Centre, and Vice President of the Dutch Society for Simulation in Healthcare. He gave a presentation on the challenges and opportunities presented by life-long learning.

The six workshops addressed the following issues: advocacy-inquiry debriefing model; training human role-players in health profession education; assessment measures for evaluating high-performing teams; integrating simulation into a curriculum; contrasts between different simulation modalities and tools; and assessment strategies in simulation-based learning.

The event also featured a session where health trainees in Qatar discussed their experiences of simulation-based learning and gave feedback and recommendations on how health educators can make simulation-based learning more effective. Entitled ‘Optimising Health Professions Education with Simulation-Based Learning’, the event was accredited locally by Qatar Council for Healthcare Practitioners-Accreditation Department (QCHP-AD) and by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME).

For updates and more information about Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, visit qatar-weill.cornell.edu.