Sim center helps ES department boost satisfaction

Advocate’s newest simulation centers offers training for both clinical and nonclinical health care staff.

Photo courtesy of Advocate Health Care

The 8,000-square-foot simulation center at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital and Advocate Children’s Hospital–Park Ridge (Ill.) completed over the summer is the largest of its kind within the Advocate Health Care system. It also includes programming for environmental services (ES) teams, which is broken into two parts to focus on both technical and soft skills.

One part of the program focuses on room-cleaning procedures, in which ES leaders and technicians learn various approaches, such as the tag-team method. In the second part, the learners clean an occupied room while conversing with the patient. They practice using Advocate’s standard introduction and, during the course of conversation, identify any special needs the patient may have and escalate those concerns to a care provider.

Kelley Sava, director of system simulation, Advocate Aurora Health, says the simulations already have helped to improve patient satisfaction scores.

“The first ES team that implemented this training and had all their team members go through the program found that patient satisfaction scores related to room and hospital cleanliness improved dramatically,” Sava explains. “They also found that they had decreased turnover in their department post-training. Simulation is a great modality to allow teams to work through processes to ensure consistency of practice.”