SimGeeks Podcast

SimGeeks Podcast is a healthcare simulation show that talks shop like a group of colleagues who enjoy each other's company. William Belk and David Shablak host. Much of its value comes from the guests, and from the hosts' habit of steering ideas back to a practical question: how would this actually work inside a program? Debriefing gets its own conversation with Adam Chang and Vince Grant of the Debriefing Academy. Chang introduces himself as a pediatric emergency physician in Calgary. The guests describe building programs with large teams and a lot of turnover, which pushed them to train their own people to facilitate. The hosts frame that episode around getting started and around all the ways people get debriefing wrong, themselves included. Games are what set the show apart. The returning guests Matt Charnetsky and Phil Wortham join a pair of episodes on roleplaying games in professional development, and one of them was recorded with no script, no notes and no rehearsal. The other asks what an organization would need to purchase and find to run such games itself. The jokes come quickly: asked whether a clinical roleplaying game still allows wizards, the answer is yes, though they may be called surgeons. The argument underneath is serious. Setting and decoration matter less than the rule set, and a shared set of rules can level the room when rank would otherwise keep someone quiet in front of the boss. Even a riff about dice that generate a scenario, with a different condition on each die, starts to sound like a design idea. The episode called 'Making the Most of What You Have – Low-Resource Simulations' weighs when low-budget tabletop simulation is a fair alternative to full high-fidelity production. Low cost is not a license to take shortcuts, the conversation insists, and the basics of good practice, such as giving people time to think, still apply. The two-part International Women's Day special is a joint edition with the Simulation Operative podcast, and the hosts hand it to Billie Paschal, who runs an all-women panel. The panel argues for bringing sim operations staff into planning meetings, because they tend to know a simpler, cheaper way to build what an educator has in mind. It also talks about coming into simulation without a clinical background, and about why the strongest programs build teams from different backgrounds. The hosts also mention representing IMSH and SSH from the conference press box, alongside the fellow podcasts Simulation Operative and The Sim Cafe. Expect occasional strong language and some innuendo. The hosts joke that by the end of a conversation they have either lost the audience or hooked it.