11/4/2015 Emily Scott
The new Jump Simulation Center will be a unique addition to the University’s College of Medicine.
Written by Emily Scott
The new Jump Simulation Center will be a unique addition to the University’s College of Medicine that will allow medical students to be a step ahead from the beginning of their education.
ISE professor Thenkurussi “Kesh” Kesavadas has been named co-director of the new Jump Simulation Center alongside Dr. John Vozenilek, chief medical officer of Jump Applied Research for Community Health through Engineering and Simulation (ARCHES) in Peoria.
The creation of the new Jump Simulation Center, which recently received $10 million in funding from Jump Trading, resulted from the collaboration between ARCHES and the College of Engineering at Illinois.
Kesavadas is also the Director of the Health Care Engineering Systems Center and said he works closely with the Jump Trading Simulation and Education Center in Peoria through the ARCHES program.
According to Kesavadas, the Jump Simulation Center will provide simulation training to medical students, a place for faculty to test their research, and an environment for collaboration between engineering and medical students.
“I’ve been involved right from the beginning, building the vision of how it should be, how it should look, all the way to the architectural design of the building,” Kesavadas said.
Currently, Kesavadas said the focus is on designing the layout of the center and thus perfecting the balance between engineering and medicine in the center’s initial stages of planning.
“My role is going to be looking at the engineering aspects of the simulation design,” Kesavadas said. “[Vozenilek] will look more from the clinical end of the simulation.”
Moving forward, they will decide what simulation training programs and equipment are to be installed in the center.
“We will start looking at various skill training systems to start identifying them, reviewing them, they’ll be tested,” Kesavadas said. A team of simulation specialists and technicians will be hired to provide training for the equipment.
“A lot of this has to happen in the next 24 months; it’s a lot of work,” he said.
The Jump Simulation Center is set to be completed by 2018.
Kesavadas said the center will include a wide variety of resources, including simulated operating rooms, team building programs, a basic skills lab, and possibly even a virtual reality training environment.
These resources will help students learn everything from basic skills such as developing an interpersonal relationship with a patient and how to insert an IV to how to dissect tissue and perform surgeries.
Simulation centers have become more prevalent in medical colleges in the last five to ten years, said Kesavadas, who is also a member of the Technologies and Simulation Committee of the American College of Surgeons. He said the Jump Simulation Center will differ from other simulation centers in several ways.
For example, its simulations will be more closely connected to the curriculum than at other medical colleges.
“Because we are doing this from scratch, we have an opportunity to actually work in the part of the curriculum,” Kesavadas said. “So our simulation center will be much more closely connected to the topics that are being taught … which is very unique.”
Kesavadas said the Jump Simulation Center will also likely have some state-of-the-art, advanced facilities.
The fact that it will be located literally within the College of Engineering — it will be based in Everitt Laboratory — also makes it unique. Often times, colleges of medicine are located on separate areas of a campus than colleges of engineering.
This closeness will allow for collaboration between engineering students and medical students, Kesavadas explained.
“This is really a fantastic opportunity for the engineering students who will do projects or learn about simulation or even do some simulation,” he said. “Think of what this can do for us.”
The features of the Jump Simulation Center will be unique to the University as well as compared to other medical colleges throughout the nation.
“Having state-of-the-art facilities right from the beginning means that our students will graduate from here having used outstanding educational resources,” he said. “Many colleges may take many years to build resources to make a simulation center. But we’ll have it right from day one.”
Read Professor Kesavadas’s interview with WAND-TV on the Jump Simulation Center.