This past weekend, UNCsim team members Dr Rebecca Smith, Dr Benny Joyner, and Mr Gene Hobbs attended the Sadie Abell Advanced Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) Fellowship Boot Camp at Johns Hopkins University along with NC Children’s Hospital PICU fellows Dr Melissa Smith and Dr Mark Dexter. This year the boot camp was attended by twenty-nine physicians from twelve countries, six continents, and ten institutions.
The boot camp provides fellowship trainees with simulation experiences that mimic difficult tasks and situations that may not occur during the normal course of a PICU fellowship. By gaining these experiences through simulation, these clinicians will be significantly better prepared to face the realities of the situations when they occur.
In 2006, following the death of Sadie Abell in the Johns Hopkins Children’s PICU, the Abells established the charitable “Sadie’s Gift”. This non-profit effort enables them to tell their daughter’s story as well as promote the heroic efforts to save her by the Hopkins PICU team. The simulation endowment is set up to help others in Sadie’s name.