Bayhealth Hospital debuted its new simulation center on its Dover campus on Tuesday: the latest step in the hospital's efforts to build a graduate medical education program and attract primary care professionals to underserved Kent and Sussex Counties.
The simulator is the product of a partnership with the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, which uses Bayhealth’s Kent County campus as a teaching hospital for third-year medical students.
With no medical school in Delaware, hospitals rely on these partnerships to help attract new staff. Bayhealth also welcomed its first class of 20 primary care residents last year and hopes to bring on more than 100 residents once its graduate medical program is fully operational.
Dr. Gary Siegelman, who helped spearhead Bayhealth’s graduate program, says providing residencies and training facilities like the simulator are essential to solving Kent and Sussex Counties’ shortage of primary care physicians and other medical personnel.
“The number of primary care physicians in Kent and Sussex Counties has not really changed in 20 years," he said. "I think Kent County has about 100 primary care physicians and Sussex has less than that. And it has remained flat for a long time.”
As the graduate medical education program expands, Siegelman says Bayhealth hopes as many as half of the residents who train at its hospitals decide to remain, though most residency programs retain between a quarter and a third of residents.
But the simulator's program manager Dr. Sarah Beebe says the new facility will also support the training needs of existing staff, including roughly 2,000 nurses who need to update their training annually to retain their jobs.
“The nurses were using an empty classroom space with beds or an empty patient room," she said. "Obviously, with the pandemic, we don’t always have an empty patient room. This gives us a designated space where we don’t interrupt patient care and where they can practice all the skills that they have to.”
