Issues in Starting a Simulator Program

Abstract

Acquiring a full-scale commercial anesthesia simulator will be a major investment for any program. Startup costs may well exceed the annual salary for a senior staff member, and annual maintenance costs may equal the salary of a nurse or technician. Before such an investment is undertaken, the program staff should have considered alternatives such as available personal-computer based physiologic simulations or a less capital-intensive “home-grown” system. If the decision is made to obtain a commercial system, the program should define clear objectives for the project and consider issues of space and equipment, staffing, and funding. I have prepared this brief discussion to help programs address these issues. This presentation is based primarily on our experience at the University of Rochester, and includes information about the actual costs we incurred while establishing our simulator program. Other academic institutions with similar resources have had similar experiences. The amount and type of resources that a program needs to commit to a simulator project may depend largely on local expertise; my discussion is aimed at programs which do not have staff who are already expert in computer simulations, and which will be therefore largely dependent on commercial vendors and institutional resources.