Sloane Olympics Stretch Residents' Skills
The end-of-the-year evaluations for residents in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center were held on Thursday, May 23, 2019. Nicknamed the "Sloane Olympics," the practical exams are meant to be a fun and formative educational exercise. The goal for the Olympics is for each of the residents to demonstrate and assess the clinical skills they have acquired over the course of their training thus far - to identify areas of strength and weakness.
"The stations are designed to be appropriate to their level of training, but that at every level they may be presented with questions that push them to their 'learning edge' - which is meant to be a good thing," said Rini B. Ratan, MD, Vice Chair of Education in the Department of Ob/Gyn.
Developed in 2008 by Vice Chair of Education Dr. Rini Ratan, MD, the Sloane Olympics is an annual event consisting of individual stations with both low- and high-fidelity simulation models. Residents in all four years participate, and each station has educational objectives that align with rotations in the curriculum. The Sloane Olympics give residents the opportunity to practice procedures on simulation models while receiving valuable feedback from core faculty and division chiefs, who oversee the stations during the evaluations. Residents don’t receive grades on their performance, as they are intended as a learning experience to evaluate their progress.
For the past three years, the Sloane Olympics have been held in the Mary and Michael Jaharis Simulation Center in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center. The SIM Center, a major training resource that integrates a standardized patient program, mannequin-based simulations, and procedural skills training, has tools, models, and set ups tailored to many different disciplines. For Ob/Gyn education, the SIM Center houses the SimMom, a birthing simulator representing a full-term pregnant adult woman, which allows students to practice diagnosis and treatment of the mother and fetus during the birth process. SimMom responds to clinical intervention, instructor control, and pre-programmed scenarios, and allows for the observation of both maternal and fetal vital signs. Instructors can simulate various types of deliveries by positioning the SimMom and baby in different positions. SimMom can be used to teach skills such as airway management, CPR, heart and lung sound auscultation, and blood pressure auscultation.
