How Can the U.S. Air Force & Jump Simulation Work Together?
The reputation of Jump Simulation, a part of OSF Innovation, as being a leader in health care education and training is beginning to expand outside of the medical industry. The facility on the campus of OSF Saint Francis Medical Center recently hosted Brigadier General Lee Payne, the Surgeon General for Air Mobility Command (AMC). AMC is responsible for airlift, air refueling, and all aeromedical evacuation (aka life flight) for the U.S. Air Force.
General Payne is the equivalent of a Chief Medical Officer for a health care system as large as OSF HealthCare. He’s responsible for 12 locations around the world in providing medical benefits and coverage for active duty members, their families and retirees—amounting to about 450,000 people. He oversees more than one billion dollars’ worth of assets and an operating budget worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
In addition to delivering superior health care every day, Gen Payne is also responsible for ensuring his teams are able to deploy in a moment’s notice anywhere around the world – often to very challenging post-natural disaster environments
General Payne and his team, based out of Scott Air Force Base in southern Illinois, requested to visit Jump Trading Simulation & Education Center to see the space, meet the staff behind the innovative work taking place and explore ways the two organizations might collaborate in the future.
“Areas we are looking to explore right now include inviting them to our simulation facilitator course, “ said Don Halpin, Health Care Systems Engineering and Sociotech Innovation Program Manager for Jump Simulation. “They would like to see how we run our sims and how we debrief our learners in the simulation environment. In turn, they are inviting us out to see their simulation system in the Air Force and what they do to get ready for people to deploy to austere environments.”
Visit dates will be discussed in the future. Halpin is an Air Force retiree who was the Director of Safety for AMC and previously worked with General Payne at the AMC headquarters. Halpin now develops new technologies and processes for Jump Simulation, incorporating aviation safety tools into the health care area. He was responsible for putting the visit together. Halpin says there’s plenty Jump Simulation can learn from AMC as well.
“We definitely, I think, can learn how they train their people to operate in a non-traditional environment, so a non-hospital based environment. Think if we were to respond to a local disaster response of a tornado coming through—how we would handle that, how we would be able to take care of people in the field and retrograde them to our facilities is something they are expert at.”
Overall, Halpin says his hope is that Air Mobility Command and Jump Simulation can work together in the future to solve health care problems and improve care for patients.