We had a chance to talk with Brittney Wright, CST, OR Clinical Educator, who has integrated PeriopSim into her training curriculum at her facility Banner Health - Churchill Community Hospital.

Background:

Brittney started her journey with PeriopSim as a star learner. More recently, she’s been promoted to a role as the Perioperative Educator.  She has been actively using the PeriopSim program to train a new learner.

Tell me about yourself and how PeriopSim has been beneficial to you as a Learner.

I have been a Certified Surgical Technologist for a long time and have almost 20 years of experience in the OR. That is probably why I did so well on PeriopSim.  However, PeriopSim contained new procedures to practice on as well. Even though I had experience with the new cases and also some of the bigger cases that you don't see as often, it was great for me, because when I got into the real surgical case, I remembered what I had done on PeriopSim.  So it did help in those aspects.

Did PeriopSim make a difference to you as a Learner?

It did make a difference for me because I spent a lot of years at a surgery center, where you do smaller cases and you don't always do those great big cases. Even though the module wasn't exactly the same, it was similar enough that I was prepared for the next procedure.

Now that you are an Educator, can you describe the benefits for your Learner, with no previous experience, using PeriopSim?

Our learner is definitely very motivated. I'm super happy with his progress.  This has been good for him. We ordered flash cards and then he started working on PeriopSim, which gave him a chance to start out with basic instrumentation.

We started with the general modules and PeriopSim has already helped him identify instruments correctly, with no previous experience. I had him do the modules for a couple weeks, and he kept on practicing. And even now during surgery, he says, “Oh, that's what that instrument is”. So, it is absolutely useful to learn the instruments and procedure in the simulation because you know what to expect in a real life procedure.

Total time impact:

The learner did 20 hours of independent simulation, which would have taken 112 hours in real life.  Approximately 2.5 weeks were saved of Learner time, Educator time and the training impact was removed from Preceptors.