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GW School of Medicine & Health Sciences Center for Faculty Excellence
August 2024 Staff Spotlight
Excellence in teaching & learning, scholarly endeavors, and leadership are all around us at SMHS. The Center for Faculty Excellence would like to Spotlight our faculty and staff contributions to SMHS, George Washington University, and beyond. Each month we will spotlight faculty and staff from across SMHS, MFA, and Children's. We want to thank our highlighted members for sharing with us their advice and perspectives!
- SMHS Center for Faculty Excellence
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Join the CFE as we highlight, Jennifer Owens, MAEd, and her role as the Director of the Clinical Learning and Simulation Skills Center (CLASS Center). Jen discusses her journey within the simulation field, the work done within the CLASS center for various learner and trainee populations, her goals for the future, and Jen’s Version for what inspires her in her work every day.
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Biography
Jennifer Owens has been in the world of simulation administration and education since 2007. She is currently the Director of the Clinical Learning and Simulation Skills Center (CLASS) at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, in Washington, DC, USA. She is involved in all facets of simulation based education for both the medical school and healthcare personnel, including formative and summative exercises and curriculum development. She has a Masters of Education from the GWU School of Education and Human Development, with a focus on MD program curriculum design. Prior to stepping into her current role, she served as Assistant Director of the CLASS Center and was a Co-Director of the Practice of Medicine Course for the MD program. She is a member of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare (SSH) and the Association of SP Educators (ASPE). She served multiple terms on the Board of Directors of ASPE, including serving as the Membership Committee Chair and the Conference Chair.
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Interview Q/A
How long have you been at GWSMHS? What drew you to your current position?
Jen: I have been at GW since 2007. After graduating from college, I moved here to DC and didn’t quite know what I wanted to do career-wise. I heard about GW’s SP Program from a few friends who lived in the area and worked as SPs (simulated/standardized patient/participant). The more I learned about the program and SP Methodology, and the role simulation could play in education, the more I fell in love with it. When an SP Educator position opened up, I applied and was fortunate enough to get the job. I’ve been at GW ever since!
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Why did you decide to pursue a career in simulation? How did your degree and experiences bring you to GW?
Jen: I have a liberal arts degree, and after discovering SP methodology, I went on to complete a master's here at GW in educational leadership and administration with a focus on MD curriculum design.
Simulation as a whole is fascinating. It has been used in various professional platforms and training for those professions for a very long time.
I'm someone who fully believes in progression being more important than perfection, and if you want to progress, you have to train, learn, and be open to practice. When we think about the field we are in –the medical field– the core of what we do is patient-centered care and successful healthcare provider-patient relationships. There is a direct correlation between simulation and the quality of care provided to patients.
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What are your major responsibilities here at GW?
Jen: As the Director of the CLASS Center, I oversee the management and operation of our simulation center. Our center has two simulation programs: a mannequin-based simulation program and a human-based simulation program. Our goal is to create educational opportunities for our clients and promote the use of simulation to enhance these experiences.
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Can you tell us more about the CLASS Center and its most popular uses?
Jen: We are a very full center most of the year! We are fortunate that simulation-based education has been fully embraced here at GW. Our SP program works with all levels of learners, starting with our undergraduate SMHS learners from basically day one of school and continuing on through to their Graduate Medical Education careers. No matter where you are in your career, learning how to communicate and fostering those skills is crucial. We introduce our mannequin-based simulation program early on as well, starting with ultrasound training and IV placement in task trainers. We find it’s important to promote these skills and educational opportunities as early as possible while ensuring our learners are not overwhelmed. As their knowledge and skill level increases, we introduce more complex skills and situations apropos to where they are at. You can imagine that a complex skill like intubation is best learned on a high-fidelity task trainer rather than on a live patient. We want our simulation programs to provide exciting hands-on experience that is relevant, has context to their training and learner level, and challenges them to continue to learn and grow as healthcare providers.
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What is your favorite thing about your current role or responsibilities?
Jen: My favorite thing about my role is knowing that the work I do makes a difference. The work I do here has a direct correlation with the betterment of our profession. Even the simplest simulations impact how people will care for their patients. Everything we do here is for the betterment of our GW community and, ultimately, patient care, and it is truly what I enjoy contributing to and being a part of.
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The CLASS Center hosts many users annually. Can you share some information about the different groups that are served?
Jen: Our largest client is the MD program, which includes both the preclinical and clinical curriculum phases. We also serve our health sciences programs, including our PA and PT programs and all the programs housed within those departments, GME programs, and programs at Children’s National Hospital. In addition to these groups, there are other GW-affiliated groups, such as the GW School of Nursing and the undergraduate programs at the University. We also conduct simulation sessions with the GW hospital staff, nurses, and additional allied health professionals.
We also have an extensive list of outside clients who pay for the services of the CLASS center, including other schools, such as the Georgetown School of Nursing, and international business clients who utilize our center for testing new medical equipment and procedures. Many medical conferences hosted in DC will visit our center to do hands-on breakout activities. It’s also important to recognize the time and attention it takes to prepare, develop, and train for our events. Planning a new simulation event/scenario begins weeks, sometimes months in advance of the session actually taking place. We also give many tours of our space for various groups like the admissions and alumni offices, and these tours are tailored and curated to the clients and their needs and objectives. In addition, the center is a space for our student learners to practice their skills and prepare for upcoming exams outside of their scheduled in-class learning sessions. So, we are certainly kept busy!
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The CLASS Center is highly dependent upon your staff. Can you tell us more about your team, what everyone does, or the complex scheduling?
Jen: Most of our schedules are set 1-2 years in advance to best serve our various clients and students. There are times when we do have last-minute scheduling, but for our core and large-scale events heavily tied to the curriculum, all of that is scheduled a year plus in advance. Since our center serves so many clients, conflicts often arise when everybody wants the space; for instance, on the first day of a rotation, everyone has something they want to do on day one, so scheduling can become challenging.
What keeps us efficient is truly fantastic staff, and I am happy to highlight their work because it goes well beyond the scheduling. All of our clients have an educator who works with them, either a mannequin-based simulation educator or an SP-based simulation educator, to work with the client to determine their needs. It is essential that the educator not only meets the objectives of the simulation event but also works with the client to design the simulation that will best fit our space and availability. Our educators are the experts in the simulation field and help ensure the clients’ time is used efficiently and effectively. And, of course, I am always here to help with some of the more “challenging” requests.
Allison McAlister, our Department Operations Lead, is the first person our clients interact with. She helps them figure out many of the general inquiries, such as when we can schedule you and the possibilities of what we can actually do. Our educators, then, are the next group our clients interact with. Currently, we have two mannequin simulation educators, Scott Schechtman and Rahil Ashraf, and two SP educators, Alex Neitzke and Jennie Lutz. Since our SP program is so extensive, we have an SP program manager, Bill Blatt, who helps it keep going in its day-to-day functions and scheduling, working with Alison to ensure we have the appropriate space for all our events. I would also be remiss if I did not highlight our Senior Instructional Technologist, Feroz Arastu; as you can imagine, we have a lot of technology in our center, and it needs to be fully functioning to serve clients. The work our team does is critical to the success of the center.
Our center is kept very busy. We are not open 24/7, but we are very close to that, especially when you take into account the number of early morning and late evening events, events that take place on weekends, and, of course, the events that occur in the space that are actually unstaffed events. One of the things that I'm striving to do with our team is to find pockets of time where we can focus on team and center needs. My goal for our group is to move into an era where we are not only capable of presenting quality products but also truly sustaining that quality.
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What about the future of the CLASS Center and GW excites you?
Jen: We have been in this current space since 2014, and this decade milestone is very symbolic for us. It’s time to start thinking about what has worked over the past 10 years and what hasn't. Where are we now, and where do we ultimately want to go? How do we grow and become a genuinely outstanding simulation space? How do we continue to grow not just in SMHS but also in the GW? And, of course, how do we do this all while maintaining the best practices in simulation methodology and patient care.
So, for me, hitting this milestone and having the opportunity to reflect on everything is exciting!
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What impact do you hope to have on trainees, colleagues, and peers?
Jen: I hope my impact contributes to the betterment of everybody who walks through the CLASS Center doors. I want people to feel they are taking something valuable away every time they engage with simulation. Whatever that means to them, I hope they take away a skill that makes them better, whether that means they are a better student or colleague because of training they just completed or even a better friend because of a lesson they saw unfold during a session. I want the CLASS Center to be an environment that fosters that betterment, and I want my impact to be that I helped people be better in whatever aspect of their life needs to be better at that time.
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What are you looking forward to working on or doing here at GW?
Jen: We have been working with augmented reality (AR) and exploring its potential for training healthcare professionals. This is very exciting, especially with all the work that's coming now with AI and it’s use in improving overall quality of care. I'm also excited to get back to our roots with some of the work I am doing now, which is focusing on basic communication skills, how we interact with each other on a day-to-day basis, and how impactful that is on all aspects of patient care in a community of caregivers with a shared global mindset.
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How does this spotlight/recognition make you feel?
Jen: It is truly a great honor to be recognized in this way and that people are interested in learning about what we do in the CLASS center. I’m grateful for this opportunity to share what we do and talk about our mission and goals. Any time I can highlight the work we do and the amazing efforts of the team, I want to do so!!
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What is one thing that keeps you motivated during the day?
Jen: These days, it’s a lot of Taylor Swift on repeat! But seriously, I spend a lot of time reflecting on how far we have come as a center and, ultimately, where we want to go. At the end of the day, I want to be able to say that I've done everything I can to ensure forward progress. Knowing that I put my all into everything I do, regardless of obstacles and challenges, motivates me to keep going.
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