by Karen Brune Mathis
Managing Editor
Mayo Clinic in Florida announced Tuesday it has received a $1.7 million gift to support development of an educational simulation center at the Jacksonville campus.
The $15 million center will include an operating room, intensive care unit, classroom, conference space and audiovisual equipment. Training scenarios can be recorded and reviewed and will link with Mayo Clinic’s simulation centers in Rochester, Minn., and Phoenix.
The gift is from the Ruthe and Nathanial Leek Estate, which helped create other Mayo Clinic in Florida programs, including the family birth center at Mayo’s former hospital in Jacksonville, the Leek Gallery at the San Pablo Road campus and the Mayo Clinic Humanities in Medicine Program.
“Mayo’s simulation training will be distinctive because of the center’s ability to support the training of multidisciplinary teams,” said Dr. David Thiel, a urologist who specializes in robotic surgery and is the center’s medical director.
“The main way you improve is you practice over and over,” said Thiel. “In medicine, we hadn’t done that until recently.”
Construction is expected to start when the fundraising campaign reaches $10 million, targeted by the end of the year. The latest gift takes it to $6.6 million.
Construction is expected to take 18 months.
Thiel said Mayo has a temporary simulator in about 2,500 square feet of space, while the new center will encompass 8,500 square feet with room to expand to about 17,000 square feet.
“A good simulation center is nothing more than a shell of what you use in real life,” said Thiel. “It improves our ability to give the safest and best care in the most cost-effective manner.”
Thiel said the question was “how do we change our health care delivery system? How do we make it safer? How do we take the waste out of it?”
He said the goal of Mayo, which is a nonprofit, was not to make money but to operate more efficiently.
With simulation, “if it improves your safety, that automatically improves your margin.”
Simulation allows physicians and others to practice on mannequins and on equipment “before you do it on somebody real.”
“Every activity that we do can be simulated,” he said.
That also includes the unexpected. A fire in the operating room? Someone experiencing a heart attack walking down the hall? Such scenarios can be simulated and the team can learn how to respond.
Doctors, he said, have to learn. “They can learn on you or they can learn on what doesn’t count,” he said.
Thiel said the profit margins are small in health care and there is little room in the operating budget for a simulation center because it does not directly generate revenues. The revenue is indirect, such as decreased infections and better care, which lowers costs.
That is why philanthropy can pay a strong part in health care.
Nathanial Leek, who died in 1998 at the age of 100, was a patent attorney. Ruthe Leek, who died last year at the age of 105, ran the Boluns ladies’ clothing store in Jacksonville for more than two decades. Both were longtime patients of Mayo Clinic.
Mayo said the simulation center will be part of a two-story addition to the Vincent A. Stabile Administration Building.
In a statement, Mayo Clinic said that recent advancements in technology, changes in medical equipment, most notably the advent of robotic surgery, and continuing innovations in medical education have combined to make simulation training more practical and effective.
It said simulation allows surgeons to practice fundamentals and work on new techniques, offers life-size operating rooms where medical teams can practice scenarios using mannequins that can realistically simulate a host of conditions as well as “respond” to treatments.
“The age of simulation training is here, and studies every day are demonstrating its enormous potential for improving the quality and safety of patient care, as well as its utility for innovation,” said Dr. William Rupp, CEO of Mayo Clinic in Florida.
“We are excited to pursue this new addition for our patients. We are especially grateful for the support of the Leek family and other benefactors because we need philanthropy to make this center a reality,” he said.
“That supports the Mayo Clinic Model of Care and our role as a leader in medical education,” said Thiel.
“But we also believe it will make the center attractive to other groups, especially continuing medical education programs. In fact, many specialty boards are now requiring simulation hours as a prerequisite for certification and recertification,” he said.
Mayo Clinic Chief Administrative Officer Robert Brigham told the Meninak Club of Jacksonville a year ago that Mayo Clinic anticipated an expansion of its educational simulation center, where physicians, surgeons and medical students can practice their skills.
According to its website, Mayo Clinic opened in Jacksonville in 1986 and uses a team approach to provide medical diagnosis, treatment and surgery.
As a tertiary care center, Mayo Clinic offers patients access to medical, surgical and research. Physicians represent more than 40 medical and surgical specialties.
In 2008, Mayo Clinic opened a new hospital at the San Pablo Road campus. It’s a 214-bed, 650,000-square-foot facility.
Mayo Clinic in Florida includes the eight-story Davis Building, the Mayo Building and the Cannaday Building. The three are connected by an enclosed walkway and linked to The Inn at Mayo Clinic, a 78-suite hotel. The Courtyard by Marriott, a 146-room hotel, is near the campus entrance.
The Birdsall Medical Research Building has 10 laboratories where scientists investigate neurological diseases.
The Griffin Cancer Research Building is devoted to cancer research.
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