The Center for Medical Simulation

What should a leader do when they’ve encouraged their team to speak up, they’ve created psych safety, and then their team gives them feedback they didn’t really want to hear: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Whether and how we respond when people share their perspective with us has a big impact on whether they will do it again later. Pockets of c...

Teamwork isn’t free—our teammates are always making cost calculations about the benefits of weighing in versus the potential costs: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 One of the main reasons people will choose not to join in a workplace discussion is because they’ve sensed that the short term risk to themselves of speaking is greater than the long...

Emira Yusufova, Lucas Farris, and Julie Hartman join us again to talk their experience at asking questions where they truly don’t know the answer: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Lucas, Julie and Esmira discuss how to balance being the expert in a debriefing for a case you’ve run many times versus allowing the participants to surprise you, how s...

“There should be no more simulation programs. There should be READINESS programs.” Jenny Rudolph and Chris Roussin team up to show how simulation programs can make themselves essential to their larger organizations: https://harvardmedsim.org/blog/simulation-to-readiness-training-that-actually-translates This video podcast was originally presented as a keynote at SimGlobe 2026 in Bengaluru, India,...

n this special episode led by Mary Fey, Dr. Penni Watts, President of INACSL, joins us to discuss what we learned helping two nursing schools achieve INACSL endorsement, and how other nursing programs can get there! Listen: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Watch: https://www.youtube.com/medicalsimulation What does high-quality simulation look lik...

Esmira Yusufova, RN, Lucas Ferris, RN, and Julie Hartman from the Society for Simulation in Healthcare’s Mindfulness Special Interest Group join us to reflect on their recent tries at the workout of the week: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 The Mindfulness Group chose to work on Curious Now #9, “What Are You Listening For?” about different liste...

“Walk me through what your work looks like,” is one of the most powerful questions a leader can ask: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 By understanding how each worker accomplishes the tasks that they’ve been assigned, we can often spot weaknesses in the system that would not be evident from an assessment of each role in the team on its own. Worko...

What does it mean when psych safety literature asks us to emphasize the purpose of the work as a leader? When we have psych safety, it can make the risks involved in making things better feel worth the effort: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 There are so many ordinary, even menial things we do every day, where if we can ferret out how they conne...

When Dr. Hannah Lawn returned home after completing a fellowship at Center for Medical Simulation, colleagues asked a simple question: How did the experience change you? “It’s changed my career,” she said. “I honestly feel like a different doctor since returning from my fellowship.” https://harvardmedsim.org/simulation-fellowship-and-international-scholars-program/

Moving our series on psych safety to the team level: how do we set expectations regarding things like reporting mistakes, managing uncertainty, or how we’re going to depend on one another? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 As a leader, we’re in charge of setting standards for issues like, whose voice gets heard in meetings? Who gets to decide when...

Psych Safety: Boundaries and the Cost of Growth | Curious Now 38 Why are we talking about boundaries in a series on psych safety? When we can’t hold consistent standards for ourselves and what we will tolerate, that unpredictability begins to undermine our team’s feelings of safety: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 As we start to change ourselves...

Where’s the line between requests and boundaries that we’re comfortable making, and ones that seem impossible to set? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 How do we recognize the trade-offs we are called to make when we are considering setting a boundary about what we will and won’t do? The reason we think about this in the context of psychological s...

How do we offer the kind of connection our teammates need to strengthen psychological safety in our teams, especially in duos? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 In the still-face experiment, not receiving the kind of mirroring or attention that infants expected led to rapid deregulation of emotion. We see similar types of emotional deregulation wh...

A clinical situation involving a violent patient led Dr. Henrique Arantes and team at Hospital Universitário Sagrada Família in Araguari, Brazil to examine whether it would be possible to use AI to quickly design an effective readiness plan around de-escalating violent patients in conjunction with a new safety protocol in their hospital: https://www.harvardmedsim.org/blog/ an-easy-free-ai-tool-tha...

When we make a mistake and get into psychologically unsafe territory, how do we recover quickly, especially when the consequences of freezing are so high?: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Hans Florine, a renowned name in the world of rock climbing, joins us to discuss a particularly difficult recovery from an error: having to descend El Capitan...

Are You Psychologically Safe? | Curious Now 34 What are the nature of the moments where our feelings of safety in a role evaporate, and we suddenly find ourselves feeling very exposed?: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 There are moments when our perceptions of being able to do the task in front of us drain away, the floor drops out, and you have...

How do we create psychological safety for our learners, especially when their day to day work begins to feel increasingly challenging and risky?: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Whether the task is cognitive, emotional, or kinesthetic, having each other’s backs and supporting one another are going to be keys to helping people reach out for the n...

Today on Curious Now we’re looking at how to repair after what you said or did lands the wrong way: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Intent/impact mismatches are really common, and for good reason: We have access to our intentions--We do not have access to others’ intentions--So we fill in the gap, often with the most negative possible interpreta...

Introducing “Coaching with Good Judgment”: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 In simulation, we’ve often defaulted to debriefing and asking curious questions to our learners to try to understand the frames behind their actions and struggles. This can be hard to balance with the truth many teachers of novices know, which is: sometimes learners just...

Hayden Richards, an Australian emergency physician and founder of the Youtube channel CommsLab, joins us to compare notes on confronting what’s going on underneath our fight/flight/freeze responses as clinicians in high stakes conversations: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 This collaboration began with Hayden’s excellent explainer on Advocacy In...

How Shared Standards Can Bring Down the Heat (with Gabe Reedy) | Curious Now 29 Gabriel Reedy, Editor-in-Chief of Advances in Simulation, joins us to talk about how shared standards can bring down the heat in workplace conflicts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 How do we as teachers and clinicians provide the conditions for people to thrive? If...

Thank you so much to our Australian hosts including Nathan Oliver and the Canberra Region Debriefing Club, a community of skilled, thoughtful teachers who made this virtual visit a deep and helpful conversation: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 In this week’s episode, Jenny joins the Canberra Region Meta Debrief Club to talk about moments in our...

Working from a challenge by Eve Purdy, this week Jenny is focusing on the edge of her expertise and the work she’s currently doing for herself, which is self-leadership using internal family systems. What this does is cast on floodlights onto your reactions, allowing you to understand the parts of yourself that are in conflict and that are putting you into a reactive mode. So who is the part of Je...

A very common dilemma—you can see something that you know can be done better, but you’re struggling with how to say that to the person doing it without damaging your relationship. Why does it keep happening that we hide our expert judgment about the situation? Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/ Apple Podcasts: https://...

We’re joined by Walter Eppich to talk about how learning happens in conversations. Specifically, Walter discusses how he watched a surprisingly successful call by a junior doctor that brought a surgeon running from the OR down to the ED to see their patient. Doctors in the early stages of their career tend to ramble when giving reports—including every piece of information that they know in the hop...