Alec Palmerton is a resident in Anesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA. He spent the month of April at the Center for Medical Simulation (CMS) on an elective rotation. The goal of the rotation program is to expose residents to the potential and operational use of simulation for education, clinical training and research. Over the course of the month, residents develop simulation scenarios including patient records, plot, setup, debriefing notes, and references.

“My time at the Center for Medical Simulation (CMS) has been a fantastic experience. There are things that I expected to learn, like how to manage a crisis, but many of the lessons that I’ve learned have extended to far more fundamental things. The educational mission, particularly as exemplified by the one-week course on how to run and debrief a medical simulation, has been the single greatest learning experience as an educator that I’ve had in my adult life. Not only does CMS have such a strong conceptual framework for education, but they embody it, in how they teach, how they run the hands-on demonstrations, and the overall commitment to education. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to have been here for the past month and to learn from such fantastic educators, and hope to be back at some point in the future!”

-Alec Palmerton, MD