Working/Functional Title

Simulation Clinical Skills Educator

Position Summary

The Michigan State University College of Human Medicine's Office of Academic Affairs invites applications for a position Simulation Clinical Skills Educator in the rank of Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Professor.  In 2016, the College of Human Medicine (CHM) implemented an innovative new curriculum, envisioned to be responsive to the needs of students and faculty in a new technological era and a new medical landscape. The SDC, provides integrated content organized around patient complaints and concerns.  It is an experience-based curriculum where medical students learn by doing.

Our novel curriculum integrates basic and social sciences with clinical experiences starting soon after matriculation.  During the first year, students are placed in primary care settings throughout Lansing and Grand Rapids communities. Second-year students rotate through several different types of clinical settings including pediatric wards, adult wards, women's health, and emergency medicine. The Late Clinical Experiences include clerkships in the primary specialties and elective rotations and occurs in the community campuses across Michigan. In addition to the integrated curriculum during clinical experiences, students engage in intensive study of basic sciences, epidemiology, health policy and other social sciences during intersessions at the end of years one and two. The Late Clinical Experience also includes Advanced Skills and Knowledge courses which span the final two years.

CHM has created a robust simulation-based clinical skills curriculum to provide medical students with a personal and supportive learning environment.  Students have about 50 half-days reserved in the curriculum during the first two years for formative educational experiences in CHM's sim centers in Grand Rapids and East Lansing. Faculty participate in the simulation program by directly observing students as they engage with standardized patients portraying common chief complaints and concerns as well as when practicing skills on task trainers.

The Simulation Clinical Skills Educators will report directly to the Director of Simulation and will support this clinical skills curriculum in a variety of ways: 

• Teaching in half-day simulation sessions focused on clinical skills development for first- and second-year medical students. This will include observing and providing feedback as students engage with standardized patients to practice clinical reasoning, interviewing, physical exam, patient education and counseling skills. Additional educational modalities include interactions with patients with abnormal findings, practicing the physical exam on exam models and learning skills using task trainers
• For a portion of these events (around 15-20%), faculty will serve as on-site back-up. If not needed for direct teaching, they will then work on other tasks that support the simulation curriculum, such as:
  • Writing/reviewing/revising cases for formative simulation events
  • Writing/reviewing/revising cases for the Progress Clinical Skills Exam (a high stakes standardized patient exam taken by CHM students)
  • Health record grading
  • Observing and providing feedback to hourly faculty in collaboration with education specialists at the Office of Medical Education Research and Development
  • Teaching clinical skills to individual students needing coaching

Educators will need to work with the medical director to ensure that they can fulfill a 0.2 FTE commitment. A more detailed description of the simulation calendar is provided below, but this generally means being available most weeks for at least three of the four half-days occurring on Wednesday and Thursday from late June through early March.

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