CMS | Center for Medical Simulation

10/31/2025

Curious Now Workout of the Week: Observe for conversations where you feel unclear—what was the point of this meeting, why are we having this conversation, what are our goals of care for this patient?

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

10/24/2025

DTBR #2: Ready to Declare a Case Has Gone Wrong

Christian Balmer, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor from Switzerland, joins us to look at the readiness of surgical teams in his organization to recognize and deal with cases that have gone beyond the capacity of the peripheral center to handle.

Far from being a readiness plan around technical skills, the team discovers that it is the gray areas between intersecting teams and intersection institutions where the process of caring for the patient breaks down. Do the ICU teams at both hospitals agree about when is the right time to transfer the patient? Do the surgeons have training on stepping back and declaring that there is a crisis that needs to be managed via transport? Are there communication plans in place to make sure that the ICU has available beds, and to help the main hospital trust that when the peripheral group sends a patient, that patient has a real need for the ICU bed?

Finally, we discuss aligning training programs from healthcare schools all the way to the hospital—if health systems are looking for teams that can talk to one another, work with patients, and provide care in a particular way, how can we make sure that the schools that are training future healthcare workers are in communication and prioritizing the skills and ability to learn that they will need to be ready for the job?

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Host & Co-Producer: Chris Roussin, PhD, Senior Director, CMS-ALPS (https://harvardmedsim.org/chris-roussin/)

Producer: James Lipshaw, MFA, EdM, Assistant Director, Media (https://harvardmedsim.org/james-lipshaw/)

Consulting and readiness with CMS-ALPS: https://harvardmedsim.org/alps-applied-learning-for-performance-and-safety

Readiness Planning in Advances in Simulation: https://advancesinsimulation.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41077-024-00317-z

Dare to Be Ready on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Dare to Be Ready on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

10/17/2025

In this special episode, Jenny Rudolph and James Lipshaw, producer of Curious Now, debrief our performance so far with the podcast, what we had in our original vision that we haven’t achieved yet, and where we’d like to go next. How can we rachet up the interactivity of the podcast, how do we make the experience of trying to do this work right more relatable and less of a lecture, and how do we tune the difficulty of the workouts to the experience levels of our guests better?

Do you have feedback for Jenny on the first three chapters of Curious Now? Now is a great time to comment—let us know below this post what you’d like to see in the future, and how the workouts are going for you!

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Curious Now on Video: https://youtube.com/medicalsimulation

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

10/14/2025

What a fabulous achievement for Shannon and our ALPS for Schools partners at UMaine!

Award recipient Shannon Gauvin (back row, second from left) poses with UMA nursing faculty at the ANA-Maine awards. Also pictured are David Adams, Dawn-Marie Hall and Lisa Held (back row), as well as Jennifer Lakey and Erin Bellaire (front row). The UMA community is celebrating Shannon Gauvin, direc...

10/14/2025

"A phenomenal crash course on Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety in healthcare. This masterclass interview helps boil down psych safety to its essence." --Laura Rock, MD, Curious Now Listener

Wondering where to start with doing psych safety right in your program? This Curious Now event with special guest Amy Edmondson, creator of the term psychological safety and author of numerous books on thriving organizations including "Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well", "The Fearless Organization", and "Teaming," is your psych safety booster!

Make sure to subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to the Center for Medical Simulation podcast channel for more Curious Now with Jenny Rudolph!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2p2bqjOCRLKckgFeaw0Oe4?si=b4c94e64685549ed

The Center for Medical Simulation · Episode

10/10/2025

We have an incredibly special guest this week on Curious Now! Amy Edmondson, Professor at Harvard Business School, and author of numerous books including Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy and The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth joins us to discuss her concept of psychological safety, how a failed study led to its invention, and how leaders can create organizations that learn.

An initial study with a well-validated tool found a correlation between having better teams and having HIGHER error rates. Reluctant to bring this result to her thesis advisor, she came to an idea: Maybe better teams don’t make more mistakes, but rather better teams are more willing to talk about mistakes.

Bringing psychological safety to the present day, Amy and Jenny discuss how the best examples of crisis leadership involve what Amy calls “situational humility,” the ability to say, “we’ve never been here before,” and then framing the problem as an opportunity to find solutions and seeking and inviting input, along with a continual refreshment of common purpose.

How can individuals create a “learning frame” to grow in a crisis rather than an “execution frame” where you’re just getting work done; being open to hearing feedback both from your colleagues and your work itself as you do it.

While “learning work” can seem in the short term to take more energy or more bandwidth, in the broader view it creates vastly easier work through an increase in skill and understanding. Dr. Edmondson says, “If you’re not an organization that has found ways to hardwire learning and feedback loops into everything that it does, you will get caught unawares in a fast-changing, complex world.”

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

10/06/2025

What a fantastic week running our Advanced Instructor Course for our friends and former fellows at the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine! The Boston course is only two weeks away, so don't miss your opportunity to transform your practice: https://harvardmedsim.org/course/advanced-instructor-course-aic/

10/03/2025

This week on Curious Now, Laura Rock and Janice Palaganas return to crack the code of team culture, map the blueprint underneath what we’re thinking. In the final episode of this chapter, we ask our guests what they’ve discovered about themselves with a Frames, Actions, Results test.

Janice has a glitch with a student where their understandings didn’t match, and Laura shares how being honest about her own critical care strengths and weaknesses with a group of trainees helped them focus on learning the most from her and other members of the team.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

09/26/2025

This week on Curious Now we’re introducing a tool to help us bring the approach of understanding why people did what they did and helping them change the underlying analysis that got them into trouble, called the FAR or Frames, Actions, Results tool.

Where has your team gotten stuck or glitchy, and what were the underlying frames that got your team intro trouble or got the job done great?

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

09/23/2025

One month out from our Advanced Instructor Course! This revamped program for simulation leaders helps you, your faculty, and your healthcare teams to be ready for the work you encounter every day in our rapidly changing field. Only a few seats remain:

The world’s foremost simulation educators lead this intensive 4-day course. Personalized training "turns the mirror" on your educational and clinical teaching and...

09/19/2025

Dare to Be Ready with Dr. Chris Roussin, founder of CMS-ALPS, the Center for Medical Simulation’s team and organization readiness consulting service!

Dare to Be Ready on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Dare to Be Ready on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Dare to be Ready on Youtube: youtube.com/MedicalSimulation

In this podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and in video form on Youtube, Chris will meet with a series of guests with specific readiness challenges in their healthcare teams. Each week we will approach the challenge of how to get teams ready for the difficult work they face every day, and work through how we can get our people and teams ready to face that challenge. Join us monthly and Dare to Be Ready!

Episode 1: Ready to Help “Safe” Patients with Diabetes in the ER

Dr. Marie McDonnell is an Endocrinologist and Director of Diabetes at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, joins us to discuss her team’s readiness challenges around training with the Emergency Room to connect triaged emergency care with diabetes specialty care.

Readiness Challenges: The care teams in the Emergency Room are ready and skilled in treating patients with diabetes who come in very sick and need to be admitted to the hospital. However, the Emergency Room also experiences a very high volume of diabetes recidivism, patients with diabetes who are stabilized and able to be discharged but then return later with the same issue presenting again. This is compounded by the fact that 50% of diabetes patients in the ER arrive between 5 PM and 9 AM because they could not contact their normal endocrinology care teams.

Today we work on a readiness plan to help ER teams better connect into the big system of diabetes care within the hospital so that patients who are “safe” get connected with specialists who can solve the underlying diabetes self-care issues that brought them to the ER, so that they don’t end up back in the ER later that day.
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Host & Co-Producer: Chris Roussin, PhD, Senior Director, CMS-ALPS (https://www.harvardmedsim.org/chris-roussin/)

Producer: James Lipshaw, MFA, EdM, Assistant Director, Media (https://www.harvardmedsim.org/james-lipshaw/)

Consulting and readiness with CMS-ALPS: https://harvardmedsim.org/alps-applied-learning-for-performance-and-safety

09/16/2025

Coming this Friday to close out : The Dare to Be Ready Podcast with Chris Roussin and many guests! See how program leaders across the world of healthcare solve their problems using simulation, and get their teams ready for the work they do every day.