
Debriefing Universal Clinical Struggles (with Bridget Van Gotten) | Curious Now #23
19/12/2025 | 22 mins.
This week on Curious Now, we’re joined by an expert in the exploration phase of debriefing to help us better understand the “listen and explore” region of PAAIL. Bridget Van Gotten is a Learning and Design Strategist for the Zamierowski Institute for Experiential Learning at Kansas University Medical Center, and a 2015 alum of the CMS Healthcare Simulation Essentials: Design & Debriefing course. The KUMC team designed a new approach to exploration when they found that in simulation, learners were simply agreeing with the debriefer’s point of view rather than trying to contrast it with their own thoughts, especially when they were doing the right thing (i.e. “I did the correct thing because that’s the correct thing to do.”) A second major discovery was that learners at all experience levels were describing the same barriers to success, rather than having different needs at different levels. For example, both med students and attendings might describe the busyness of the code space as making it difficult to claim a leadership role during the case, often using the exact same words. Bridget coaches Jenny on how to conduct better explorations of learner thinking, in this case in a faculty development conversation about classroom management and maintaining the attention of learners. #healthcaresimulation #nursing #medicine #debriefing 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/

Why Real Questions Feel Risky in Debriefing | Curious Now #22
12/12/2025 | 16 mins.
Debriefings are often delayed and diminished by questions the asker already knows the answer to. “Wouldn’t it have been better to give epinephrine faster?” “Did it occur to you to have a family meeting?” And when asked why they don’t just share what they clearly think is the answer, the debriefer will often say something like, “It’s better for them to come to the answer themselves.” But we aren’t really asking the learner to come to an answer with these kinds of questions—we’re asking them to read our mind, and then to agree with us once they do. There’s no opportunity for them to understand their own thinking better. Today’s episode will try to get you ready to live with the discomfort of not knowing the answer you’re going to get for long enough to ask a genuinely curious question in debriefing. Workout of the week: Every day, ask one truly open-ended, curious question—one you don’t already know the answer to. Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/ #healthcaresimulation #medicine #nursing #debriefing #podcast

DTBR#3: Ready for Pediatric ECMO + ECPR
05/12/2025 | 28 mins.
Dr. Catherine Allan, Director of the Cardiac Care Unit and Inpatient Cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic joins us to talk about readiness for teams to perform pediatric ECMO, a high-risk, high-complexity therapy that staff might only see a third as often as they see patients on ventilators. ECMO can also be called for during CPR, which greatly increases the time pressure and complexity of the procedure. During ECPR, there is not only the ICU resuscitation microteam but also the surgical team and the perfusion team, leading to potentially having up to 20 people working in the room when running an ECPR case. We discuss how leaders can help connect seemingly imposed efforts like checklists and huddles to what it is that frontline workers are trying to achieve and are meaningful to them, and how simulation program designers must do the same in order to make sure that training is not a top-down checklist but rather a mutually owned process that gets teams where they believe they need to go. Host & Co-Producer: Chris Roussin, PhD, Senior Director, CMS-ALPS (https://harvardmedsim.org/chris-roussin/) Producer: James Lipshaw, MFA, EdM, Assistant Director, Media (https://harvardmedsim.org/james-lipshaw/) Consulting and readiness with CMS-ALPS: https://harvardmedsim.org/alps-applied-learning-for-performance-and-safety 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

Awkward Silences and How to Prevent Them | CMS Book Club #16
26/11/2025 | 35 mins.
Just in time for the Thanksgiving Holiday— the CMS Book Club reviews “How to Avoid Awkward Silences” by Patrick King! “You set the tone for how people react to this… when you act awkward and diffident, people feel awkward and diffident.” Join us as eight learning conversation experts debate the value of silence, and how we can get the conversation back to flowing when we feel like we’ve lost touch with what’s happening in the debriefing room, classroom, or around the family dinner table. Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Impact, Not Feelings | Curious Now #21
21/11/2025 | 14 mins.
Why is it so hard for healthcare educators to share what they actually think in a debriefing or feedback situation? Jenny shares the story of a participant in an anesthesia clinical simulation who helped guide her to be more transparent: “I’m often talking to providers on the worst day of their career, after a medical error has occurred. If I’m going to ask them to be honest with me about what they were thinking, the least I can do is be honest about what I’m thinking.” Over the years training faculty in feedback conversations, we’ve run into many who ask, how is it helpful to tell my learner that I think they’re an idiot? But telling the person what you think honestly should not be your feelings or attributions about their character. It should be the impact of their actions, which exist at the level of concrete data. Workout of the Week: Practice saying to people, “When you did x, it led to y.” One great feature about this workout is that you can use it for positive things! “When you stayed late to help me with that report, it lowered my stress level.” 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/



The Center for Medical Simulation