AU’s SPEAR Center celebrates rebranding, Simulation Education Week

“If we’re doing our jobs right, people won’t even know we exist.”

It’s a sentence that’s been said dozens of times by those who work in the Simulated Patients for Education, Assessment, & Research, or SPEAR Center at Augusta University.

Their jobs include a wide range of responsibilities, all aimed at designing simulation events and making sure they run seamlessly for students and instructors from AU’s health sciences programs.

Normally, they’re working out of sight and out of mind behind the scenes, but Healthcare Simulation Week is the perfect opportunity to highlight the staff and faculty members who go above and beyond to curate realistic simulation events for AU students.

A professionally dressed person stands beside a medical mannequin in a clinical operating room and smiles at the camera. — A.J. Kleinheksel, PhD, stands with a medical mannequin in a simulated operating room in the SPEAR Center. [Michael Holahan/Augusta University]

“There’s something special about being on one team and having everybody working together toward the same goal of providing high-quality experiences for our faculty and our students,” said A.J. Kleinheksel, PhD, assistant dean for Educational Simulation at Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. “It’s very fulfilling.”

Recently, the SPEAR Center was rebranded and upgraded to ensure it could be utilized to its full potential. Along with a name change came an accreditation from the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, the hiring of more staff members, upgraded equipment, including two new critical care mannequins and anesthesia machines, as well as a more streamlined scheduling process so students from all of the health sciences programs on campus can get the most use out of the center.

“It really does feel like a dramatic shift, both for our team and how we’ve been empowered to work more collaboratively together. The new equipment we have that’s been provided by the provost’s office has been wonderful, but also I think the culture has shifted,” Kleinheksel said. “For our fall semester, which is historically our busiest semester, we were able to accommodate every single event that was requested.

“Really that’s the dream, right? To provide everyone who wants to use the space with the resources and the expertise to do that,” they continued. “And the fact that we were able to do that speaks volumes in terms of how far we’ve come, and it makes me excited about the future, because the team has really gelled.”

Four hospital beds set up in a row in a simulated hospital. Curtains are drawn back beside the beds and various medical equipment is around them. Conference tables and chairs are set up on the other side of the room.

While these changes surely helped the center become a better version of itself, none of it would be possible without support from key stakeholders among university leadership and without each team member giving 100% effort. The center is an amenity that sets students up for future success as health care professionals, and its staff can be credited for making it the well-oiled machine it is today.

Jobs in the SPEAR Center typically fall under four units: research, operations, standardized patients and education. Kleinheksel covers most of the research tasks, and the other units are composed of five to seven members.

Jack Crockett is a simulation operations specialist in charge of coordinating, setting up and breaking down the simulation events.

Two men and a woman have a conversation in a medical lab room. — Jack Crockett, left, gives a tour of the updated SPEAR Center to new faculty members.

“We communicate with faculty to discuss what their event is going to entail and what their setup requirements are. We make sure we’ve got the supplies we need for the event and then create documentation for the events so that we have a shared understanding with the faculty about what they’re going to see when they come into the space,” he said. “Then we set up the events and support them the day of. Any sort of troubleshooting or support that faculty or students need while they’re in the center, we provide it for them.”

Nekesha Lattimore, also a simulation operations specialist, has been working at the SPEAR Center for the last two years. Prior to the rebranding, she said she mainly coordinated events for MCG by herself. Now, having additional support on her team has made it easier for her to do her job, which, in turn, has had an impact on the students.

A woman with shoulder length hair takes a selfie. — Nekesha Lattimore is a simulation operations specialist.

“It’s like an instant excitement when they come through the door that you didn’t see before. They seem more excited to be here; they seem more excited to learn,” she said. “We’re also a lot busier, so people are actually more interested in visiting the center.”

Lattimore explains that the average person might not know everything that goes into an education simulation job, so the rebranding and the celebration of Healthcare Simulation Week has given their jobs well-deserved exposure.

Two people wearing headphones observe a medical patient and two medical students throw a glass window. — AU faculty members observe a standardized patient and health sciences students through a one-way glass window in the SPEAR Center.

“I know for myself, when I first applied for a simulation job, I had no idea what simulation was, and then you walk through those doors and you feel like you’re in a hospital. That was amazing to see,” she said. “I’ve noticed that tours have picked up as well; people are coming over to the center to see what it looks like and then gaining interest. This semester, we have seen a few groups that hadn’t been visiting as much in the past.”

Heading up the standardized patients program is Edward Agabin, MD, who manages a team of about 70 standardized patients, coordinators and advisers at AU and its satellite campuses across the state. His job is to oversee what the standardized patients do, recruit them for different specializations, work with his counterparts to select standardized patients for cases and help train them for the roles they’ll be portraying.

A man wearing a lab coat smiles at the camera. — Edward Agabin, MD, is the director of the Standardized Patient Program.

“The standardized patients love the new layout. We worked with physical therapy for the first time a month ago, and they loved it – it’s something different for them,” Agabin said. “They were doing physical therapy exercises, and this is something they’re not used to doing with the medical school, but they love the experience of working with a different field, working with different specialties outside of medical students.”

As the interim director of education at the SPEAR Center, Millie Harper works with course directors to help their students meet learning objectives through simulation events.

“Many faculty who use the space bring extensive clinical backgrounds, but they don’t always have experience with simulation, which requires a different teaching approach than bedside care,” she explained. “My role is to support liaisons and course directors to provide faculty development, design and refine cases that anchor to curricular goals and ensure learners gain the outcomes they’re aiming for.”

Millie Harper is the interim director of education at the SPEAR Center.

Harper said the rebranding has simplified processes pertaining to the SPEAR Center’s inventory and clinical spaces and has also allowed her to work with programs from AU’s College of Nursing, College of Allied Health Sciences and MCG.

“We’ve been meeting with different colleges to share the services we offer, explain how we can support their simulation events and highlight the resources we provide,” she said. “Over time, I expect our presence and partnerships with those colleges to continue to grow.”

She uses MCG’s simulation education elective as an example of how awareness about these kinds of jobs is needed.

“In the elective, students explore the history of simulation, study adult learning theories and ultimately design and pilot their own simulation case by the end of the course,” she said. “It’s one of the most rewarding parts of my job. Time and again, students tell us, ‘I had no idea so much went into simulation.’ That’s why it’s so meaningful to have our work highlighted and recognized; the team behind it is truly exceptional.”

Two students practicing medicine stand over a medical manikin in a hospital bed in a simulated hospital room. — Health sciences students assess a medical mannequin’s condition during a simulation event in the SPEAR Center.

While updates to the center have helped it stand out even more nationally amongst other colleges, Kleinheksel said the team wants to keep fine-tuning it and pushing forward to make an even greater impact in patients’ lives.

“The ultimate goal of everything we do here is to improve patient outcomes for Georgians. We know we need more physicians, we know we need more nurses, we know we need more respiratory therapists. We need all of these health professions, and we need them to be trained well,” they said. “So, I really hope that by providing these higher quality simulation experiences for our learners, we’ll both better prepare the students we have but will also attract an even higher caliber of applicants because what we offer here is special.”