CAMH simulation centre makes history

By Sean O’Malley
Senior Writer

The CAMH Simulation Centre has just been granted official accreditation status by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, making it the only hospital mental health simulation centre in the world to be so honoured.

“It’s a great achievement for CAMH,” says Stephanie Sliekers, Manager of Simulation and Digital Innovation. “Building a consistent standard and integrated competencies in mental and physical health assessment embodies CAMH’s vision that ‘mental health is health.’ Our simulation centre not only helps create a high standard of care for people with mental illness, but also a high standard of training and education for healthcare professionals who care for people with mental illness.”

Some of the key areas the simulation centre is currently focused on include suicide risk assessment, acute care psychiatry simulations and deteriorating patient scenarios, which are being used in virtual training exercises by Project ECHO Ontario Mental Health.

"These virtual simulations further develop knowledge and skills in mental health care that expand on our current ECHO Ontario Mental Health education experiences,” says VP education Dr. Sanjeev Sockalingam. “We are able to provide immersive learning experiences, hands-on skill development and accessible team-based training to more interprofessional primary care teams across the province to further support CAMH’s mental health capacity building efforts."

So how exactly do you do a mental health simulation?  For CAMH, it starts with creating psychological safety where health professionals can learn and reflect on clinical skills without risk to patients. It also involves co-producing with service user educators, who helped plan and design TIDES (Trauma-Informed De-escalation Education for Safety and Self-Protection).

One of those educators, George James, worked with TIDES and met with the Royal College accreditors to share his experience.

“It’s important to bring the patient’s and family’s voice to the table because we are the end users,” says James, who has received treatment for depression at CAMH. “When you get input from patients and family members, a fully integrated program can be developed. I believe the CAMH team saw the success of this approach with TIDES and appreciated the importance of having an integrated approach with teaching staff.  I definitely felt my voice was heard.”

For the actual mental health simulations, CAMH hires professional actors, who are trained as simulated patients, to portray real-world mental health scenarios developed by the clinical team and service user educators like James.

Because of the importance of providing as much uninterrupted mental health care as possible for patients at CAMH without the need to send them to another hospital for physical health emergencies, the simulation centre also provides extensive physical health simulation scenarios, including surprise medical emergency simulations and a physical health assessment program that has been offered to all nurses at CAMH. Just over 1,000 clinicians received training at the Simulation Centre in 2020/21, with much of being done virtually due to COVID-19 protocols.

“Simulation centres are well-established in other health care specialties, but there aren’t many examples of a simulation centre in a mental health hospital,” adds Sliekers. “When people ask me what we do in our centre, I think of Dr. Ivan Silver (Former CAMH VP Education), who said the only limit to the kind of simulations we can do is our imagination.”