Sim2Lead: A New Era in Leadership Training for Healthcare Professionals

Statement: Sim2Lead: A New Era in Leadership Training for Healthcare Professionals is a descriptive program report supplemented by early qualitative impressions. It describes a conundrum faced by the international healthcare professional community on how to train leadership, co-leadership, and teamwork skills to clinical healthcare teams to manage a high-stake critical medical event such as a complex resuscitation. The background of the creation of the Sim2Lead program at Starship Child Health and the foundations of the program content are described in the article. This novel combination of high-fidelity side-by-side coaching during simulated scenarios and a new simulation debriefing framework with a specific focus on leadership skills are described alongside mindfulness and predictable strategic tools. This article presents qualitative data findings from postcourse surveys with thematic coding. The future intentions of the Sim2Lead program to train a high standard of leadership and co-leadership skills for critical event management through simulation are also described. Sim2Lead combines simulation methods to train the next generation of critical event leaders. This early descriptive program report is limited by its qualitative impressions rather than this being an outcomes study. This limitation is likely to be addressed through future studies investigating performance-based data or follow-up to assess transfer of practice of Sim2Lead participants.