Rahmi M. Koç Academy of Interventional Medicine, Education, and Simulation (RMK AIMES) is dedicated to not only serving Koç University medical and nursing students, and Koç Healthcare medical professionals but also the entire region to improve healthcare through the use of simulation and advanced learning approaches.
The use of simulation in healthcare education connects conventional classroom learning to a real-life clinical experience. The primary purpose of healthcare simulation is the reduction of avoidable medical errors associated with human factors. Performed in a safe learning environment, healthcare simulation can range from practicing relatively simple technical skills such as performing injections to more elaborate and complex skills such as cardiac catheterization. Simulation can also focus on improving one’s non-technical skills such as decision-making, leadership, effective teamwork, and communication skills.
Over the last four decades, Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) has become the gold standard for the assessment of clinical competence. More than 1,000 research papers have been published on the OSCE and considerable knowledge has been gained as to the learning outcomes that can be assessed.
Standardized Patients (SPs), actors that are trained specifically to perform a standardized script of physician-patient interaction, and OSCE take an increasing part in contemporary health professions education across all disciplines and across the continuum of healthcare education. They are key educational tools for both high-quality teaching and the evaluation of clinical skills.
Partial task trainers and mannequins also play an integral part in healthcare simulation and education. Task trainers allow the repeated practice of individual skills ensuring the development of confidence and competency. Mannequin-based training places participants in a realistic clinical or non-clinical setting with a mannequin and enables them to learn from predetermined scenarios. Lessons learned from the mannequin-based simulation are key to improving the healthcare environment and the delivery of care to patients in the future.
Koç University was founded in 1993 as a non-profit private university in Istanbul, Turkey. Koç University strives to be a center of excellence, one that succeeds in providing a world-class education to its students, creating new knowledge via the research of its faculty, applying the acquired knowledge for the benefit of society, and equipping its students with the highest sense of ethics, social responsibility and good citizenship.