Providing appropriate education for nurses working in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) to develop and update the skill sets and knowledge required to care for infants and children with congenital heart disease (CHD) is a challenge. We provide care to children with a variety of congenital heart defects that require medical care and surgical corrections. In the extreme circumstance, we provide extracorporeal membrane oxygenation to those children who require extracardiac support postoperatively. Our program deals with a mean of about 150 cases annually that require surgical correction, in addition to the medically managed patients with CHD.
The hospital-based simulation center opened in 2010. It provides high-fidelity simulation to enhance current medical and nursing education. Patient scenarios are created on the basis of real patient cases, maintaining the realistic details of the disease and injury processes essential to provide the pertinent learning points of each case. Shortly after the simulation...