An accomplished health educator and community advocate arrived in Peoria this week to discuss advances in medical simulation and its uses as a tool for social innovation.
Dr. Edward M. Barksdale Jr. gave a keynote presentation Thursday at OSF HealthCare’s Jump Trading Simulation and Education Center, focusing on the intersection of simulation, innovation, community health, and improving society.
“I think we often get so infatuated with simulation and innovation in health care that we focus on the fancy device or the glitzy computer, that we are at times leaving our communities behind,” Barksdale said in an interview with WCBU ahead of his speech.
“Simulation is the stage where health care rehearses for humanity. It teaches us not just to save lives, but to save whole lifetimes, and we do that by infusing an empathetic approach and empathy into the way that we’re designing systems and simulating.”
Barksdale is a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He also serves as chief surgical officer for the Chicagoland Children’s Health Alliance, and is co-founder of a holistic, hospital-based pediatric violence intervention program called the Antifragility Initiative.
“The greatest innovation in medicine is not a device or a technique, it’s a mindset,” said Barksdale. “Simulation allows us to practice bold, human-centered solutions that ripple outward, transforming not just our patients, but people, communities, and, in fact, I believe, the fabric of society itself.”
Barksdale spoke as part of the Dr. Richard Pearl Lecture Series, citing a 35-year friendship with Pearl, the former surgical director at the Jump Simulation Center.
“It is really the vision that he had of coming to a community, working with the hospitals to build a hospital for children — not just to build it with brick and mortar, but to build it with flesh and blood and breath and spirit and soul that I think is so fitting for community like Peoria,” said Barksdale.
Barksdale commended the Jump Simulation Center for helping the medical community make strides in addressing issues ranging from infectious disease to community violence.
“The vast majority of people that are dying in this part of Illinois, and out through the whole heartland, people are dying from premature death — causes known as deaths of despair: drug overdoses, alcoholism, suicide, and I would add homicide into that,” said Barksdale.
“Sometimes what happens in our society, we turn our heads our eyes and we close our ears to the things that we don’t want to address. It’s easy to deal with diabetes and heart disease because we can get our arms around that.
"But it’s very hard to understand a 34-year-old man who dies by suicide, or a 14-year-old boy who dies as a result of gun violence. I think that health care needs to look at how we can mobilize our communities to address those things that matter.”
