CMS | Center for Medical Simulation

10/10/2025

We have an incredibly special guest this week on Curious Now! Amy Edmondson, Professor at Harvard Business School, and author of numerous books including Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy and The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth joins us to discuss her concept of psychological safety, how a failed study led to its invention, and how leaders can create organizations that learn.

An initial study with a well-validated tool found a correlation between having better teams and having HIGHER error rates. Reluctant to bring this result to her thesis advisor, she came to an idea: Maybe better teams don’t make more mistakes, but rather better teams are more willing to talk about mistakes.

Bringing psychological safety to the present day, Amy and Jenny discuss how the best examples of crisis leadership involve what Amy calls “situational humility,” the ability to say, “we’ve never been here before,” and then framing the problem as an opportunity to find solutions and seeking and inviting input, along with a continual refreshment of common purpose.

How can individuals create a “learning frame” to grow in a crisis rather than an “execution frame” where you’re just getting work done; being open to hearing feedback both from your colleagues and your work itself as you do it.

While “learning work” can seem in the short term to take more energy or more bandwidth, in the broader view it creates vastly easier work through an increase in skill and understanding. Dr. Edmondson says, “If you’re not an organization that has found ways to hardwire learning and feedback loops into everything that it does, you will get caught unawares in a fast-changing, complex world.”

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

10/06/2025

What a fantastic week running our Advanced Instructor Course for our friends and former fellows at the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine! The Boston course is only two weeks away, so don't miss your opportunity to transform your practice: https://harvardmedsim.org/course/advanced-instructor-course-aic/

10/03/2025

This week on Curious Now, Laura Rock and Janice Palaganas return to crack the code of team culture, map the blueprint underneath what we’re thinking. In the final episode of this chapter, we ask our guests what they’ve discovered about themselves with a Frames, Actions, Results test.

Janice has a glitch with a student where their understandings didn’t match, and Laura shares how being honest about her own critical care strengths and weaknesses with a group of trainees helped them focus on learning the most from her and other members of the team.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

09/26/2025

This week on Curious Now we’re introducing a tool to help us bring the approach of understanding why people did what they did and helping them change the underlying analysis that got them into trouble, called the FAR or Frames, Actions, Results tool.

Where has your team gotten stuck or glitchy, and what were the underlying frames that got your team intro trouble or got the job done great?

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

09/23/2025

One month out from our Advanced Instructor Course! This revamped program for simulation leaders helps you, your faculty, and your healthcare teams to be ready for the work you encounter every day in our rapidly changing field. Only a few seats remain:

The world’s foremost simulation educators lead this intensive 4-day course. Personalized training "turns the mirror" on your educational and clinical teaching and...

09/19/2025

Dare to Be Ready with Dr. Chris Roussin, founder of CMS-ALPS, the Center for Medical Simulation’s team and organization readiness consulting service!

Dare to Be Ready on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Dare to Be Ready on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Dare to be Ready on Youtube: youtube.com/MedicalSimulation

In this podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and in video form on Youtube, Chris will meet with a series of guests with specific readiness challenges in their healthcare teams. Each week we will approach the challenge of how to get teams ready for the difficult work they face every day, and work through how we can get our people and teams ready to face that challenge. Join us monthly and Dare to Be Ready!

Episode 1: Ready to Help “Safe” Patients with Diabetes in the ER

Dr. Marie McDonnell is an Endocrinologist and Director of Diabetes at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, joins us to discuss her team’s readiness challenges around training with the Emergency Room to connect triaged emergency care with diabetes specialty care.

Readiness Challenges: The care teams in the Emergency Room are ready and skilled in treating patients with diabetes who come in very sick and need to be admitted to the hospital. However, the Emergency Room also experiences a very high volume of diabetes recidivism, patients with diabetes who are stabilized and able to be discharged but then return later with the same issue presenting again. This is compounded by the fact that 50% of diabetes patients in the ER arrive between 5 PM and 9 AM because they could not contact their normal endocrinology care teams.

Today we work on a readiness plan to help ER teams better connect into the big system of diabetes care within the hospital so that patients who are “safe” get connected with specialists who can solve the underlying diabetes self-care issues that brought them to the ER, so that they don’t end up back in the ER later that day.
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Host & Co-Producer: Chris Roussin, PhD, Senior Director, CMS-ALPS (https://www.harvardmedsim.org/chris-roussin/)

Producer: James Lipshaw, MFA, EdM, Assistant Director, Media (https://www.harvardmedsim.org/james-lipshaw/)

Consulting and readiness with CMS-ALPS: https://harvardmedsim.org/alps-applied-learning-for-performance-and-safety

09/16/2025

Coming this Friday to close out : The Dare to Be Ready Podcast with Chris Roussin and many guests! See how program leaders across the world of healthcare solve their problems using simulation, and get their teams ready for the work they do every day.

09/15/2025

Name-Claim-Aim, The ABC’s of Teaming | SAEM SIMPosium, Sept 16 @ 1 pm:

At the SAEM SIMPosium, Dr. Lon Setnik shares practical, simulation-tested strategies to strengthen emergency team function. Participants will try on the Name-Claim-Aim framework to rapidly clarify priorities, assign leadership, and guide interventions—while fostering a culture where speaking up is the norm. Through focused, deliberate practice in SimZone 1, attendees explore how to recognize crises, call for help, and dynamically adapt as situations evolve. This session equips clinicians with tools to translate simulation learning into real-world readiness and discusses the benefits of low complexity simulations as the cornerstone of building fundamental skills, and how to treat teaming as its own skillset that deserves its own curriculum.

09/12/2025

Curious Now: Laura Rock, Janice Palaganas and Jenny explore where they are currently struggling in their practice of sharing their point of view clearly and then really inviting the other person’s perspective. How does this go when your identity is more provisional, and you feel like to have to establish yourself and insert your point of view to be ‘strong’?

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Science Podcast · Updated Biweekly · A nurse preceptor has just watched a trainee commit a serious error despite hours of lecture, reading, and hands on training. In spite of herself, she starts to heat up, much like the more severe clin…

09/05/2025

Today we’re talking about transforming toxic culture, whether on your floor, in your unit, or in your department. How do we change unit culture via point of care conversations? You can teach people all the speaking skills in the world, but if they don’t care about the other people in the room or don’t think there’s a possibility they aren’t perfectly right, it won’t take. This topic was featured in a keynote of the same name by our colleague Laura Rock at SESAM2025 this summer.

Workout of the week: Share your point of view, and follow it with a genuine, open inquiry into the other person’s perspective.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

09/02/2025

Imagine a healthcare system where clinicians and staff feel continuously supported, prepared, and resilient in the face of challenges. This vision is becoming a reality thanks to a groundbreaking partnership between CMS-ALPS and ULS Alto Ave (ULSAAVE), a leading regional healthcare system in Portugal...

Read more:

Imagine a healthcare system where clinicians and staff feel continuously supported, prepared, and resilient in the face of challenges.This vision is becoming a reality thanks to a groundbreaking partnership between the Center for Medical Simulation's Applied Learning for Performance and Safety (CMS-...

09/02/2025

CMS Executive Director Roxane Gardner will give the keynote "Be Ready to Team: Build Continuous Learning Pathways to Safer Care" on Sept. 4 at the 8th Latin American Congress on Clinical Simulation and Patient Safety / 1st Colombian Congress on Simulation-Based Education, in Bogotá, Colombia.

Learn more: https://www.flasic.org/congreso