Fundraising News
Case receives $10 million grant to improve patient safety
Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation awards its largest grant ever
With
a $10 million grant from the Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation,
Case Western Reserve University will create one of the
world's foremost centers for patient safety-using the most
advanced forms of simulation-based medical training.
The
Case School of Medicine's new Mt. Sinai Center
for Medical Simulation aims to reduce medical errors that
result
in an estimated 100,000 deaths annually in this country
by teaching students about patient care and by offering
continuing medical education for health care professionals
in the workplace.
Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation's
largest ever grant award was finalized earlier this week. "For
the Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation, this cutting edge
project exemplifies
the highest standard of patient care, medical training
and research that were the hallmarks of The Mt. Sinai
Medical Center," said Robert S. Reitman, outgoing
board chair of the foundation.
"The grant demonstrates
once again the century-old commitment that the Cleveland
Jewish Community
feels and expresses through action for our neighbors
as well as mankind." Reitman noted that facilitating
collaboration among Cleveland's major medical institutions
was a strong motivating factor in the foundation's decision,
as was the return of academic medicine to the former
Mt. Sinai campus.
"The Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation's
grant focuses the efforts of the entire Cleveland medical
community on health care quality and the development
of innovative strategies to ensure patient safety," said Ralph I.
Horwitz, M.D., dean of the School of Medicine. "The Mt. Sinai Center
for Medical Simulation will be unique in the learning experiences it will
provide and will
enable students and licensed practitioners in the health professions to
achieve clinical mastery. In addition, this center demonstrates unparalleled
collaboration
and commitment among the university's schools of medicine, nursing, dental
medicine and social sciences, along with the major teaching hospitals in
Cleveland."
Reducing medical errors, curbing health
care costs and improving caregiver-patient communication
spurred the development of the
center by a local consortium
comprised of Case Western Reserve University's Schools of Medicine, Nursing,
Dental Medicine,
Social Science and Engineering; University Hospitals of Cleveland; MetroHealth
Medical Center; the Cleveland Clinic Foundation; the Louis Stokes Cleveland
Department of Veterans' Affairs Medical Center; and local businesses.
"We believe the center will have
a profound effect on health care and will become a model
for others in the nation," added Horwitz. "Furthermore,
the educational and research possibilities afforded by this center,
as well as the potential for the development of national
and international business relationships,
are tremendous. We are truly grateful to the Mt. Sinai Health Care
Foundation for their gift to make these plans a reality."
Fred
Rothstein, CEO and president of University Hospitals
of Cleveland, stated, "When
UHC and Case forged its 50-year partnership agreement, we recommitted
ourselves to our educational missions and pledged together
to create the most advanced
medical teaching models for the next generation of physicians. This
gift from Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation brings us another
step closer to becoming a
national model among academic medical centers for the training of new
physicians.
The Case School of Medicine will oversee operations of
the new center.
The new center will not only train
students at Case but the more than
1,750 medical
residents
and fellows in training programs as well as hone the skills of
health care professionals, first responders and emergency
medical professionals
across
Northeast Ohio through
continuing medical education.
"This new center will become
a powerful and unparalleled new force in medical education
for Case and the Greater Cleveland community," said
President Edward M. Hundert, M.D. "The Mt. Sinai Center
for Medical Simulation will become a hub for the generation
of new interdisciplinary simulation curricula
and technologies, with the ultimate goal of improving the quality
and safety of medical care."
In addition to health
care training, the center will focus on designing and
testing new simulation technologies with the assistance
of
students and faculty
at the
engineering school as well as research and development experts
at BioEnterprise, Early-Stage Partners and Symbionix, among
others.
The new simulated action learning
will complement traditional training with actual patients
and will enable
students and
health professionals
to learn
in ways that
eliminate risks to patients. Education tools will range from
low-fidelity simulators to complex human patient simulators
and training with
virtual surgical tools.
"There is no question that this
facility will have a direct result on improving patient
care in Cleveland," said Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation
President Mitchell Balk. "This is a most appropriate
way to perpetuate the Mt. Sinai legacy as a first-tier
community teaching hospital."
Practicing medical procedures
on human-like simulators will create virtual reality
experiences for students that
diverge
from the
traditional and
anecdotal educational
model in medicine of "see one, do one, teach one," noted
Dr. Jeffrey Ponsky, a surgeon and director of graduate
medical education at the Cleveland
Clinic, and one of the Center's key supporters.
Case
will partner as a "sister center" with the
Israeli National Center for Medical Simulation in Tel
Aviv, the international benchmark for centers engaged
in simulation-based medical education. Dr. Amitai Ziv,
director of the Israeli
center will serve as an adjunct faculty member at the
Case medical school and consultant on the development
of the center and its programs.
For more information, contact Mitchell
Balk, Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation, 216-421-5500.
June 2004
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