The Center for Medical Simulation

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...

Agency is the Power to Act | CMS Book Club Live at #IMSH2026 Roxane Gardner and Grace Ng react to Shawn Kanungo’s keynote talk on innovation at #IMSH2026. Watch here: https://youtu.be/tbUfYHhM3kE Roxane and Grace both felt that the content of the talk was surprisingly supportive, especially for an ‘innovator’ who was speaking about the role of AI in the changing industry. Much in the way that we t...

Change Comes from Curiosity and Caring | Curious Now Live at #IMSH2026 Commenting on Kevin Brown’s “The Hero Effect” – How do we bring our presence to ordinary moments? Jenny Rudolph, James Lipshaw, and Jenny Bourque discuss Kevin Brown’s story of a chef using an encounter with his son’s specific dietary restrictions as the launch point for a higher standard which makes Disney’s restaurants more a...

Ready to Work Creatively Whether Our Organization Likes It Or Not | Dare to Be Ready Live at #IMSH2026 Chris Roussin reacts to Tania Katan Keynote Lecture at #IMSH2026 on The Dare to Be Ready Podcast “You need to be different from the status quo to make change.” What does it mean to be called to innovate and work creatively in an organization that is ready and asking for it, versus in an organizat...

Welcome to the Center for Medical Simulation’s Grand Rounds presentation of the new publication in Advances in Simulation, “The Advocacy Inquiry Rubric (AIR), a Standard to Build Debriefing and Feedback Skills”. Lead author Clément Buléon, an anesthesiologist based in Caen, France, joins CMS Senior Director of Innovation Jenny Rudolph and CMS Assistant Director of Instructional Design James Lipsha...

This week, Jenny and James discuss how organizations, not just individuals, can have hidden or implicit standards that are not spoken aloud. We look at how a tool like the new Advocacy Inquiry Rubric, or AIR, can help make excellent performance visible, learnable, and repeatable, and how explicit standards help us target what actually matters in performance and what we want to move toward as a sha...

We're taking this week off, but we'll have a new podcast on January 2nd, and the CMS media team will be in San Antonio from January 11-14 for IMSH 2026! We hope to see you there.

This week on Curious Now, we’re joined by an expert in the exploration phase of debriefing to help us better understand the “listen and explore” region of PAAIL. Bridget Van Gotten is a Learning and Design Strategist for the Zamierowski Institute for Experiential Learning at Kansas University Medical Center, and a 2015 alum of the CMS Healthcare Simulation Essentials: Design & Debriefing course. T...

Debriefings are often delayed and diminished by questions the asker already knows the answer to. “Wouldn’t it have been better to give epinephrine faster?” “Did it occur to you to have a family meeting?” And when asked why they don’t just share what they clearly think is the answer, the debriefer will often say something like, “It’s better for them to come to the answer themselves.” But we aren’t...

Dr. Catherine Allan, Director of the Cardiac Care Unit and Inpatient Cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic joins us to talk about readiness for teams to perform pediatric ECMO, a high-risk, high-complexity therapy that staff might only see a third as often as they see patients on ventilators. ECMO can also be called for during CPR, which greatly increases the time pressure and complexity of the proce...

Just in time for the Thanksgiving Holiday— the CMS Book Club reviews “How to Avoid Awkward Silences” by Patrick King! “You set the tone for how people react to this… when you act awkward and diffident, people feel awkward and diffident.” Join us as eight learning conversation experts debate the value of silence, and how we can get the conversation back to flowing when we feel like we’ve lost touch...

Why is it so hard for healthcare educators to share what they actually think in a debriefing or feedback situation? Jenny shares the story of a participant in an anesthesia clinical simulation who helped guide her to be more transparent: “I’m often talking to providers on the worst day of their career, after a medical error has occurred. If I’m going to ask them to be honest with me about what the...

When we lead a conversation where we only bring our conclusions and inferences to the table, rather than the concrete data that helped lead us there, we are influencing (sometimes unjustly) what is even discussable among our teams. By going back down to discussing the data that helped us shape those conclusions, we can make conversations and meetings more fair, more equal, and more productive. Wor...