Overview
This full-day faculty development workshop is designed for emergency clinicians who want to move beyond simply running scenarios and develop a more intentional, effective, and sustainable approach to simulation facilitation. Delivered by faculty from Starship Children’s Hospital ED and Perth Children’s Hospital Simulation Team, the day focuses on strengthening how simulation is framed, facilitated, and embedded within emergency departments to maximise engagement, learning, and practical relevance to real clinical work.
Participants will explore how to reframe the purpose of simulation beyond education alone, choose the right simulation modalities for different objectives, build sustainable interdepartmental simulation programmes, scaffold psychological safety, navigate difficult debriefs, and begin linking simulation activity to meaningful improvement efforts in their own departments. The programme combines short plenary sessions, highly practical workshops, small group design sprints, and honest faculty reflections from the trenches.
Faculty
Dr Khang Hee Gan, FRACP, – Lead Facilitator
Paediatric Emergency Specialist, Children’s Emergency Department and Senior Medical Officer, Simulation Team, Starship Children’s Hospital
Dr Thomas Volkman, FRACP
Consultant Paediatrician, Perth’s Children Hospital, Department of General Paediatrics (Green Team Lead), Department of Refugee and Global Health, Postgraduate Medical Education (Co-director Simulation team), Rural Paediatric Service (Ngaanyatjarra lands), University of Western Australia (Paediatrics Division)- Senior Lecturer
Dr Kiranjeet Singh, FACEM, PEM
Paediatric Emergency Medicine Specialist, Children’s Emergency Department, Starship Children’s Hospital, Auckland, NZ
Katherine Wilson, FRACP, PEM
Perth’s Children Hospital
Erin Carn-Bennett, RN, MN
Senior Paediatric ED Nurse and Educator, Starship Children’s Hospital
David Barrett RN
Simulation coordinator Perth Children’s Hospital Simulation
Who Should Attend
Emergency clinicians who are already facilitating simulation regularly and want to take their programmes to the next level.
ACEM CPD Hours
Educational Activities (EA): 5 hours 15 minutes
Reviewing Performance (RP): 2 hours
Measuring Outcomes (MO): 1 hour
Health Outcomes: Professionalism
CPD Leadership High-Level Requirement (HLR): YES*
*only for participants who join the ‘The Co-Leadership Dyad in ED: An Innovative Training Approach’ session.
Agenda
| Time | Topic/Activity | Presenter/Facilitator |
| 0830-0915 | Simulation That Matters: Moving Beyond “Just Education” Reframing simulation as a driver of patient safety, system testing, interprofessional teamwork, and latent safety threat identification; not merely an educational activity. | |
| 0920-1005 | Choosing the Right Simulation: Matching Method to Purpose How to select the right simulation “zone” and modality based on objectives, resources, fidelity, participants, and debriefing approach; and when high-fidelity is not the answer. | |
| 1005-1035 | Morning Tea | |
| 1035-1250 | Breakout Streams (Choose three out of the four 40-minute workshops with 5 minutes transition time between sessions) A. Getting Other Teams in the Room: Interdepartmental Simulation That Works Practical strategies for designing, launching, and sustaining interdepartmental simulation collaborations; including how to attract specialty teams and keep them coming back. B. The Co-Leadership Dyad in ED: An Innovative Training Approach Exploring multi-modal approaches to leadership, co-leadership and teamwork training beyond traditional scenarios, using practical mini-activities and transferable frameworks. C. Making it Challenging Yet Safe: Scaffolding Psychological Safety in Simulation Moving beyond the pre-brief: layered strategies to improve psychological safety before, during, and after simulation, even when emotions run high. D. Not Everything Needs a Manikin: Rethinking Simulation Modalities Using tabletop simulation, teamwork games, escape-room style activities, and VEMS to achieve learning and system objectives with lower resource burden. | |
| 1250-1335 | Lunch | |
| 1335-1435 | When Debriefs Get Difficult: Navigating Emotion, Power, and Pushback Practical strategies for handling defensiveness, hierarchy, strong emotions, and disagreement in debriefs – without sacrificing psychological safety or learning impact. | |
| 1440-1540 | Making Simulation Count: From Practice to Measurable Improvement A hands-on design sprint where participants use real departmental challenges to build simulation-driven improvement cycles, including outcome measures, system change, and re-testing plans. | |
| 1540-1600 | Afternoon Tea | |
| 1600-1645 | The Scars of Simulation: Faculty Lessons from the Trenches Faculty from Starship Children’s Hospital ED and Perth Children’s Hospital Simulation Team share mistakes, missteps, and hard-won lessons from building simulation programs in the real world. |