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One emergency
Many professionals
One goal: to provide the best possible help
We’ll show you how to train for this.
At the SAM Simulation Center in Mönchengladbach, medical professionals practice important procedures in realistic scenarios involving medical emergencies, particularly childbirth. Managing Director Petra Coenen explains the goal of the courses:
Interview Petra Coenen, Geschäftsführerin, SAM
It’s not just one professional group that handles an emergency; it always involves collaboration between doctors, nurses, midwives, and emergency medical personnel. That’s why it’s so important to actually practice communication, task allocation, and all these things together.
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Learning here involves not only state-of-the-art equipment, but also “doing, observing, and reflecting.” The midwifery certification course is not just about perfecting every step of the birthing process, but also about ensuring that trained international professionals become familiar with the requirements in Germany.
Interview, Julia Scholz, Division Management: Obstetrics Simulation & Assessment
This course is designed precisely to bridge those gaps. And that starts with a process of realization—that things work differently here, that expectations for the role are different, and that I now have to change my established, automatic way of doing things. In Germany, we often fall back on a certain pattern of reaction.
There is also a lack of recognition for the expertise they bring with them, and that naturally makes it difficult to embrace these new ideas. And it is precisely this process that is now being disrupted by simulation-based learning, because we film the midwife—specifically, midwives in action from around the world—and then, as a group, we watch video clips together to ask: “What actually happened there?”
We often just work with still images, for example, without providing any commentary. And that allows them to gain this insight on their own.
Interview Schülerin Marina Mitisheva
You could say the technology is very advanced. The level of realism is incredibly high. And when you work with a mannequin a lot, you simply forget that it’s a mannequin.
We have many nationalities here. We can support one another and learn a lot together.
That's great.
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While highly functional mannequins are used as training aids, supplemented by virtual and augmented reality technologies, in some scenarios actresses also play the role of patients.
Interview Petra Coenen, Geschäftsführerin, SAM
Our equipment naturally allows our professionals to immerse themselves in the simulation very quickly. Because we can control the simulators and have relatively realistic work environments, we’re fortunate that the participants feel fully immersed in the setting – and we can tell: they’re emotionally invested. Afterward, they need a few minutes to come down and truly say: “This feels very real, and it really enhances our learning experience.”
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Numerous studies show that simulation training can have a massive positive impact on patient safety.
Interview Julia Scholz, Division Management: Obstetrics Simulation & Assessment
Teams that regularly train together in simulations improve their performance.
And ultimately, this leads to greater safety for both the healthcare professionals themselves and the patients. And that’s why I would say: No matter where the healthcare professionals come from, they all need an environment where they can learn, where they interact with one another as equals, and where they work together (and that is, after all, our core mission) to fundamentally change the culture and understanding of collaboration at the grassroots level.
Interview Petra Coenen, Geschäftsführerin, SAM
We would like to see simulation training firmly established in the training curricula for all healthcare professionals, whether they are doctors, nurses, or midwives.
