Practice makes perfect: Training future-ready health professionals
Story by Brenda Branswell
April 2026
A team of internal medicine residents hovers around a patient in distress, not knowing what’s wrong with him – which is the point of this training session.
“Help!” moans the robotic medical manikin lying on a gurney. “I have back pain…When am I going to get my dialysis?”
In the adjacent control room at McGill’s Steinberg Centre for Simulation and Interactive Learning, Dr. Jeffrey Wiseman, BSc’72, MDCM’76, MA’05, is speaking into a microphone to make the robot talk. He’s also observing how the residents diagnose and stabilize the patient.
When the patient is correctly administered calcium, dextrose and insulin for life-threatening hyperkalemia – high potassium levels in the blood – Wiseman instructs a technician next to him to raise the manikin’s blood pressure to 120/80 on her computer screen.
“Oh, I feel so much better, what have you done?” the robot says, as the residents smile.
Simulated scenarios like this one occur daily at McGill’s Steinberg Centre for Simulation and Interactive Learning, which welcomes 18,000 learners annually, from medical students, residents and practicing physicians, to nursing, and physical and occupational therapy students.
“The ability to practice these very high-stakes events in a safe environment, and to do it over and over again, is something that’s uniquely available through simulation training.”
Dr. Gerald Fried, director of the Steinberg Centre for Simulation and Interactive Learning
The goal: to provide future health professionals with hands-on training that exposes them to difficult diagnostic scenarios or procedures before they encounter them in a clinical setting.
“Many of these emergencies are not all that common,” says Wiseman, the centre’s director of education. “They don’t happen every day, but they’re still extremely important emergencies to know how to treat because if you make the correct diagnosis and work together as a team, there’s a very high likelihood that you’ll save a patient’s life.”
The Steinberg Centre – or SIM Centre as it’s known informally – is a sprawling 31,000-square-foot facility near downtown campus that includes a simulated operating room, a nursing station and clinic rooms, a technical skills space, a simulated home-care environment, and much more.
Learners get to solve life-threatening problems in a simulated environment that allows them to make mistakes, says Steinberg Centre Director Dr. Gerald Fried, BSc’71, MDCM’75, a professor of surgery at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. “Because in the real world sometimes mistakes happen and you have to learn how to get out of trouble.
“We train people in a lot of procedural skills, from things as basic as starting an intravenous or putting on a cast to very sophisticated and operative procedures like doing robotic surgery through the nose into the base of the brain and full abdominal or thoracic operations,” says Fried.
“The ability to practice these very high-stakes events in a safe environment, and to do it over and over again, is something that’s uniquely available through simulation training.”
Lightbulb moments
For Marie Conrad, MSc’19 Applied (Physical Therapy), there’s a full circle aspect to being back at the Steinberg Centre, now as an instructor for the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, in addition to her work as a physiotherapist at the Jewish General Hospital.
At a recent training session, Conrad played the role of a patient with Guillain-Barré Syndrome who was improving but still weak. “I’m going to have a bunch of fake lines and leads and tubes coming off of me. The students are going to practice getting me up, out of bed and sitting in the chair for the first time, while learning how to manage all of the lines and the leads.”
Conrad says she always learned a lot when she visited the centre as a student. “As an instructor, I really enjoy it because I feel like I see light bulbs go off in the students’ eyes, of understanding the reason why we’re doing certain things. I think it’s a very enriching experience.”
New ‘SIM Hive’ for interactive and virtual education
The Steinberg Centre is poised to expand this spring at its current location, thanks to generous support from the Birks Family Foundation. The new SIM Hive will be home to interactive and virtual education, allowing students to practice procedures in their free time, such as chest-tube insertion using virtual reality (VR) technology.
Wearing a headset and holding hand modules, Dr. Junko Tokuno, MSc’22, a thoracic surgeon from Japan and education manager at the Steinberg Centre, deftly demonstrates a VR scenario for training students to insert a chest tube into a collapsed lung.
“You can see how realistic this is,” says Fried, as Tokuno injects the local anesthetic into the chest of the virtual patient on the computer screen. “This requires the student to know all the steps of the procedure, what instrumentation to use, and to go through the entire procedure. We’ve done some research that shows VR-trained students perform better than those trained through lectures alone.”
The Steinberg Centre launched in 2006 and bears the name of the late couple who helped make it possible: Chancellor emeritus and philanthropist Arnold Steinberg and his wife, Dr. Blema Steinberg, professor emerita of political science at McGill.
Community support remains vital for the centre, allowing it to buy and replace costly simulation equipment, says Fried.
“The generosity of our donors has been extraordinary and has allowed us to do meaningful and valuable educational programs that ultimately serve our community because we can make sure that our health care professionals can take better care of you.”
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