Simulation-Based Education in the Training of Newborn Care Providers—A Malaysian Perspective

Simulation-based education (SBE) is increasingly used as an education tool to improve learning for healthcare providers. In newborn care practice, SBE is used in the Neonatal Resuscitation Program (NRP) and training in procedural skills. The NRP is a mandatory course in Malaysia for all house officers (interns) and medical officers (residents) during their pediatric rotation. Almost 30,000 of NRP providers have been trained over the last 5 years. The recent establishment of the Allied Healthcare Center of Excellence (AHCoE), an organization dedicated to promoting SBE, and Malaysian Society for Simulation in Healthcare (MaSSH) aims to enhance the integration of SBE into the healthcare training curriculum and set up a local healthcare simulation educator training program. Our experience in implementing SBE necessitated that we made several important choices. As there was no strong evidence to favor high-fidelity over low-fidelity simulation, and because simulation centers can be very costly to set up with limited resources, we chose SBE mainly in the form of low-fidelity and in situ simulation. We also identified an important developmental goal to train Malaysian instructors on structured debriefing, a critical activity for learning in SBE. Currently, debriefing is often carried out in our centers at an ad hoc basis because of time limitation and the lack of personnel trained. Finally, we aim to implement SBE further in Malaysia, with two axes: (1) the credentialing and recertification of physicians and nurses, and (2) the education of lay caregivers of high-risk infants before discharge from the neonatal intensive care unit.