July 28, 2022By Lance Baily

INACSL 2022 Sim Media Center HealthySimulation.com Interviews – Part III

HealthySimulation.com was in attendance at the 2022 International Nursing Association of Clinical and Simulation Learning (INACSL) annual conference in mid-June in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As part of this year’s event, themed “Stronger Together,” HealthySimulation.com helped facilitate the Sim Media Center to host interviews with leaders across the healthcare simulation industry. This article is the first in a three-part series highlighting excerpts from these interviews, with this one sharing commentary from the chair of the INACSL Standards Committee, representatives of the International Nursing Association of Clinical and Simulation Learning (INACSL), and representatives of the Global Network for Simulation in Healthcare (GNSH).

INACSL 2022 Sim Media Center HealthySimulation.com Interviews – INACSL’s New Standards

HealthySimulation.com: Can you tell us a little bit more about your work and the team, what INACSL is doing with these standards, and what are they all about?


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Penni Watts, Ph.D., RN, CHSE-A, FSSH, FAAN (Chair of the INACSL Standards Committee and Assistant Dean of Simulation at UAB): The standards are basically a foundation for simulation and how we implement and use best practices. They’ve kind of developed through the years, and this of course is something that you can purchase. It’s got all the standards in there as well. It’s really a good guide for anyone at any level, any profession, any situation to really have evidence in how they conduct their simulations. This committee has spent the last several years [revising these standards] although COVID prolonged us a little bit in revising and adding the two new standards.

HealthySimulation.com: Tell us a little bit about how do you create these standards? How do we collect the information that we need to have and how do we truncate it down to be a simple kind of explanation of these complex ways of doing business as it were in terms of operations of simulation?

Penni Watts: I have to say our committee, we were fortunate that there were already standards that were developed in 2011 by pioneers and simulation. That began with the research and evidence, and over the years they’ve added and grown. We were given the opportunity to go through the literature. It was based upon a survey of the membership, but generally about the research that is out there, that the community has conducted and implemented and disseminated. We did a systematic review of the literature with a healthcare librarian that helped us pull all that together. That’s what we formulated these, and they are complex, but I think for anyone there are ways you can start and find some. If you have a deficit in one area, you can start with that one.

INACSL 2022 Sim Media Center HealthySimulation.com Interviews – GNSH


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HealthySimulation.com: What is GMSH and what has it tried trying to accomplish as a whole?

Mary Anne Rizzolo (President of GNSH): GSH got started in 2010, and it’s kind of unique in that it brings together the leadership of many different organizations around the world that believe in simulation and believe that it can be a solution to some of our problems in healthcare. Also, the vendor community is so important because they need to know what products we need and what they need.

They see the universe of simulation differently from academics and from those in practice settings. So collectively, I think it’s a wonderful way for us to get together, and talk about problems that exist in healthcare and what we can do in simulation to attack some of those problems and work together. I think the one thing about GNSH is that we can’t do it by ourselves.

It requires a con collaboration and every organization has its own strengths and unique characteristics that can contribute various pieces. When we all come together, it’s wonderful. It’s not only about the networking learning that takes place for the leadership of all these industry institutions or organizations and corporations, but also about pinpointing where are the opportunities to collaborate in a way that promotes the industry as a whole.

I think that’s, what’s so great about GSH is it provides the first kind of opportunity for us to really do that in an ongoing capacity. INACSL has its own marketing efforts, and HealthySimulation.com has its own marketing efforts. Some of the community might be missing some of these resources. They might not know about them or more important than that, I think some of the messaging that takes place is different between organizations. I think bringing groups together and having kind of one look and one team provides for a way to better communicate about simulation to the wider global audience as a whole.

HealthySimulation.com: What is GSH accomplishing right now? What are some of these unique projects that GNSH has been working on?

Carol Durham (Professor and Director of the Education-Innovation-Simulation Learning Environment (EISLE) for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing): We have done some amazing work at looking at what are the issues around the world that are healthcare issues that we have in common. There are things that you would expect: hospital card infections, sepsis, medication errors, and also care team issues? So we develop this team engagement that’s free access. If you go to the website of GNSH.org, you’ll be able to get to that website and work with these cases.

These are 30-minute weekly initiatives. There should be 30 minutes part of that. The way we got to 30 minutes, which is really unique is we actually invited our industry partners in the hospital healthcare system and said, what would work? What could you allow your employees to engage in? And they said, 30 minutes, that’s what we could afford.

That’s where we said, okay, then that’s what we need to do. We’ve created these amazing things that are ways for us to engage around real patient stories that have often had tragic endings. How can we examine them and look at how we don’t do the same thing ourselves within our system. How do we learn from others and examine what got us to that point and avoid it, and then have the team themselves engage in that and actually talk about it?

Oftentimes teams will say, well, you know, that may be that story, but in reality, that happened here last week. How can we improve our own communication and collaboration and teamwork to improve our own systems? Right. Looking at it from a system point of view, instead of just one patient, one team, that kind of thing.

We are so much better together than we could be apart. Right. Now we are exploring avenues of world organizations that are focused on healthcare worldwide so that we can maybe make a difference with simulation in all of its facets – in creating ways that we can bring teams together with the focus and improving the care of the patient in front of us.



It’s a privilege to be a part of this organization. [We’re] really interested in others becoming a part of the organization because we need work to be done to envision, and operationalize the work that we’re thinking about. It’s a lot of thought leaders who have come together really looking beyond any one organization, but collectively, what we might be able to do.

More About INACSL

INACSL’s mission is to advance the science of nursing simulation by providing worldwide professional development, networking resources, and leadership in defining healthcare simulation standards of best practice. Formally naming itself INACSL or the International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning in 2002, the organization has grown from an all-volunteer organization based in Texas to a worldwide resource with over 2500 members. INACSL educational materials and resources can be used by anyone.

INACSL holds an annual four-day conference every June in various centers around the United States and Canada. The conference focus is mostly geared toward Nursing Education at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Hospital education departments could also benefit from conference attendance. These events provide education sessions, research results, networking opportunities, and vendor exhibits for leading companies such as Laerdal, CAE Healthcare, SimulationIQ, Gaumard, B-Line Medical, KBPort, Pocket Nurse, 3D Systems, and more. In addition, INACSL provides webinars, leadership book clubs, and journal roundtables in a virtual format.

INACSL is accredited as a provider of continuing nursing education by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation. In addition to the standards of best practice, INACSL offers other online resources including homegrown solutions links, a bibliography of simulation articles, and resources for researchers. INACSL publishes the journal Clinical Simulation in Nursing with Dr. Nicole Harder as the current Editor-in-Chief.

Learn More About INACSL


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