Barbara Walsh

Dr. Barbara Walsh will serve as the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Children’s Medical Center site investigator. She has been heavily involved with pediatric simulation-based education since 2006 and is the Director of the Pediatric Emergency Medicine Simulation Program. She has implemented and directed several education programs including all Pediatric and Emergency Medicine resident simulation curriculum. She is an active member of the CELS (Center for Experiential Learning and Simulation) committee at UMass for the development and planning of the UMass simulation center. She has been the PI on several simulation studies involving resident education that have been presented as research posters at IMSH annual meeting (2011 and 2012) and SAEM annual meeting (2011). Barbara holds a Faculty Development Certificate in Simulation Education and has also taken post-graduate course work on simulation at Harvard’s Center for Medical Simulation. Barbara has recently developed and initiated the COMET program at UMass: Community Outreach Mobile Education Training. Barbara has successfully piloted a mobile simulation educational program to General Emergency Departments and In-Patient Pediatric Units where she has taken the hi-fidelity manikin to run resuscitation scenarios to improve community health care provider’s clinical skills and teamwork when caring for critically ill children. She has longstanding expertise in pediatric emergency medicine (PEM) as she has been a PEM attending at a level 1 trauma center/ teaching hospital for over a decade. Dr. Walsh is confident that her preliminary data show a need and desire of general emergency physicians in local communities to have a regular simulation intervention to improve their care of sick children. She is confident based on her prior mobile simulation endeavors that this project will provide the critical data to inform and change how general ED physicians care for children with proposed implementation of such projects like COMET in the future.