Simulation in Medical Education (SiME) Seminar Series
DATE & TIME: January 16, 2009 @ 12 noon, Light lunch will be served.
LOCATION: Goodman Simulation Center, Room H3552
SPEAKER: Marcus Watson, PhD
AFFILIATION: The University of Queensland
TITLE: A CASE FOR FUNDING LARGE SCALE SIMULATIONS IN AUSTRALIAN HEALTHCARE
DETAILS: The Australian Federal Government has committed to spending $175.6(AU) million on the construction of new and mobile high-tech simulated learning environments and the expansion of education and training facilities at major regional hospitals over the next five years. The Queensland State Government is contributing millions more each year to developing the simulations delivery programs to enhance skills development for over 30,000 clinical staff. The expansion of simulations based training in Queensland is expected to produce over 20,000 annual training days by 2013. A/Prof Watson will report the case for investing in health simulations and discuss the factors that constrain the rate of expansion of healthcare simulations in Queensland. He will discuss how Queensland Health is adopting a systems approach including core procedural and Crisis Recourse Management courses, postgraduate qualifications in Health Simulations and a distributed state-wide network. He will also present the problems unique to Queensland Health and the issues that generalise across healthcare.
MARCUS WATSON: Associate Professor Marcus Watson is a Cognitive Systems Engineer who has worked in defence and healthcare simulations. He has a BSc(Hons), Grad Dip CS and MSc from La Trobe University and a PhD from Swinburne University of Technology. He is the Senior Director of the Queensland Health Skills Development Centre. He is also an Associate Professor of Medical Education in the School of Medicine and an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at The University of Queensland. Marcus’ current research examines cognitive engineering, time-critical decision making, the representation of information in complex environments and simulations. Marcus is currently working in three main areas: (1) The use of simulations for the design and evaluation of clinical equipment and processes; (2) Verbal communication visualisation and content analysis tools for knowledge elicitation and learning. (3) The development of the Fundamentals of Colonoscopy training program. Marcus supervises PhD students working on simulator design, simulation education and collaboration in e-learning and video conferencing. He has received national awards for innovation and the Jerome Ely Award for the Best Paper in Human Factors for 2004.
