Sarah Beebe is Rethinking Blame: Using Simulation To Heal Teams And Improve Care

What if the most powerful fix for a bad clinical outcome isn’t another skills refresher, but a simulation that tests your actual system under real constraints? We sit down with Dr. Sarah Beebe—nurse midwife, educator, and founder of 2Bs Consulting—to unpack how translational simulation turns training into measurable change. From a teen birth scenario that ignited curiosity and clarity to a clinic code that exposed equipment gaps and role confusion, Sarah shows how reenacting real cases can reveal the truth that root cause summaries often miss.

We dig into the nuts and bolts: moving beyond individual blame to examine carts, defibrillators, room layout, staffing, and communication flows. Sarah explains why language matters, how psychological safety unlocks honest reflection, and what “good” debriefing looks like when the goal is system redesign. Then we zoom out to strategy. Hospitals already track length of stay, sepsis bundle compliance, code frequency, and time-to-shock—so use that data to script scenarios. When dashboards drive training, simulation aligns with current risks, and teams can watch metrics improve as workflows are fixed, roles are clarified, and equipment is streamlined.

AI is changing the game, too. We explore practical, near-term uses: generating scenario variants that match caseload trends, creating virtual standardized patients, and supporting debriefs with timing and communication analytics. Sarah’s research in screen-based simulation highlights how digital tools can assess diagnostic reasoning at scale, while preserving the facilitator’s judgment at the bedside. The throughline is clear: treat simulation as continuous quality improvement—measure, simulate, fix, remeasure—and watch confidence return after tough events.

If you care about safer care, faster recognition, and teams that trust their processes, this conversation offers a roadmap you can start using today. Subscribe, share with your quality and education leads, and leave a review with one question you want simulation to answer next.

Innovative SimSolutions.
Your turnkey solution provider for medical simulation programs, sim centers & faculty design.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Disclaimer/ intro 0:00

The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of anyone at Innovative Sim Solutions or our sponsors. Welcome to The Sim Cafe, a podcast produced by the team at Innovative Sim Solutions, edited by Shelly Huuser. I join our host, Deb Tauber and co-host Jerrod Jeffries, as they sit down with subject matter experts from across the globe to reimagine clinical education and the use of simulation. So pour yourself a cup of relaxation, sit back, tune in and learn something new from The Sim Cafe.

Sarah’s Path Into Simulation

Deb Tauber 0:54

Welcome to another episode of The Sim Cafe. And today, unfortunately, Jerrod can't be with us. He's got no power in Nashville from the storms. So we are here with Dr. Sarah Beebe. Welcome, Dr. Beebe. Thank you for being a guest. And why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Sarah Beebe 1:10

Thank you. Yes. So as uh Deb mentioned, my name is Sarah Beebe. I am from uh Lewis, Delaware. So on the east coast of the United States. And uh we also have snow and ice right now. But my background is nursing. I was an OB nurse for a number of years and then became a nurse midwife and a nurse practitioner. And then when I was tired of sleeping with my phone, I went into academia and uh worked at the University of Delaware for seven years and ran their women's health portion of their simulation program, and then got my PhD from George Washington University, where my uh dissertation work was in using screen-based simulation to assess diagnostic reasoning in family nurse practitioner students. So I've always had a passion for competency and how people learn, and so it fits really well with uh simulation. And then I started a hospital-based simulation center. I moved from academia to uh back to the clinical setting and started a uh hospital-based uh SIM center from the ground up and got it accredited in under three years and then decided to go out on my own. And now I own uh 2Bs Consulting, which is a simulation consulting business.

Deb Tauber 2:32

Awesome. Yeah. We're kind of have the same little company kind of thing. Yeah.

Sarah Beebe 2:38

Yep.

Deb Tauber 2:39

All right. Now, Cyril, we're gonna go back to some of the questions that we used to do in the early interviews of uh simcafe. Why don't you go ahead and share your journey into simulation?

Sarah Beebe 2:50

So I am young enough and old enough that simulation was a part of my undergraduate nursing education. And in fact, Amy Copperthwaite with Avkin was my very first sim educator that I had in nursing school, and then we became colleagues. But I had been a theater nerd in high school and a performer, and so when I got to nursing school and I had to act out my skills in simulation, I was like, oh, I can do this. This is great. But more seriously, I saw how simulation truly leads to improved outcomes and mastery of specific skills and concepts that you just you can't do in the classroom. And so then I had simulation as a part of my education and then also as an educator for years and years. Obviously, in obstetrics, we use simulation a lot. So it's always been a big part of anything that I do.

Deb Tauber 3:47

Awesome. Yeah. No, I was gonna ask you if you knew Amy, but it's good to know everybody loves Amy, right?

Sarah Beebe 3:53

I know, yeah. No, I got to, I have seen literally every part of the Av Birth because she had University of Delaware engineering students working on like little projects each semester. And so they'd come over to my lab and ask me, like, does this cervix seem normal to you? Or, you know, each semester I never knew what they were gonna bring me, but it was a lot of fun to kind of see the whole process from little details all the way up to the belly. So yeah. Very cool.

Deb Tauber 4:26

Now, do you have a favorite or most impactful simulation story that you can share with our listeners today?

Resuscitation, Trauma, And System Gaps

What Translational Simulation Means

Sarah Beebe 4:33

So it's hard to pick one. I knew that you were gonna ask me this. And I've seen simulation used in so many different ways, but I have two favorites, and I'll be brief. But um, my first one was while I was still in academia, I had a group of uh it was a it was a teen girls empowerment group from the city of Wilmington, Delaware. And they had come to me because they had heard that I had a birthing simulator and they just wanted to see it. And so uh we had a Saturday morning, our Simop specialist and I came in and we designed a teen birth simulation because I was like, well, if they're gonna come and see the mannequin, like they have to do something. So they were all the friend of this birthing mother, and I had nursing students that came in to act as the nurses, and and those teenage girls, when I say light bulbs going off about technology and and how to prevent teen pregnancy and nursing, it was like the light bulbs were bursting over their heads, like it was so cool. Not only did they love being a part of the actual simulation and seeing the baby born and all that kind of stuff, they wanted to look inside the belly and they wanted to look at all the parts and and they were just they were enamored with it all. And then we got to have a really great conversation about okay, so who wants this to happen to you anytime soon? And uh, and so then I got to put my midwifery hat on and and we had a great conversation and discussion, and it was just so much fun. But then also when I was in the clinical setting again at the most recent health system that I was at, I had a number of departments that came to us because they had had some sort of outcome that they weren't pleased with or it was unexpected. We had this one group that one of their outpatient offices, somebody had cardiac arrest in their outpatient office. And the outcome was not what they expected, and and how the resuscitation went was not what they had hoped for. And so not only were they coming to us to practice the resuscitation skills, they were also coming to us with the trauma of being a part of a resuscitation that didn't go the way they hoped it would. And so many of the staff members didn't even know what they could do to improve or how to prevent that from ever happening again. And so, yes, we practiced resuscitation. We we had a, we simulated a cardiac arrest in an office setting and they all acted in their roles, but we also used it as an opportunity to talk through what they had in their office, what their resources were, did it work for them? Did they actually have the right resources? Which in some ways they didn't. There were certain situations where they didn't have all the resources that they needed, and then they also had too many resources. They had a full code cart, but didn't have a defibrillator that had a rhythm on it. It was just the defibrillator that you would see out in the community, and so they actually had too many resources and didn't know how to use it. So we were able to use simulation not just for training, but for the opportunity to really test their own systems and to watch them to like to watch that confidence build in them, not in their skills, but I mean that happened too, but but the confidence in their system and in their process as a team, and then also to watch some of that trauma just kind of melt away because they knew what they could do in the future, and that it wasn't just one person's fault. And actually, it really wasn't anybody's fault, but we looked at the entire system and the entire process and where that process had broken down for them, as opposed to looking at it from a perspective of, oh, you didn't know your BLS skills. That really had very little to do with it at all. And so using sim in that way has is just really rewarding and and really cool to see how that works.

Deb Tauber 8:49

Now, would you say that was translational simulation?

Sarah Beebe 8:53

Yeah, so that is an example of translational simulation, which I feel like in 2025 that has become a bit of a buzzword. And moving into 2026, IMSH, it was being used a lot, and not everybody knows what that means. And so uh that's one thing that I've really been trying to work on is explaining to people that simulation doesn't have to just be for education, it can also be used as a tool for systems integration and testing and improvement, where a performance improvement plan or a training plan has nothing to do with it at all. And that's really what translational simulation is. Yeah.

AI’s Growing Role In Simulation

Deb Tauber 9:42

Now, where do you see the future of simulation going?

Using Hospital Data To Drive Scenarios

Sarah Beebe 9:45

So I would be remiss if I didn't say AI and technology are taking over simulation and we're but I mean it's true. We've seen even in just the past year from IMSH 2025 to this year, so many more people have figured out how to use AI to build to build their own simulations or to have simulated patients or to use it as a debriefing tool or things like that. And really, especially while it's still kind of open source to everyone, I think that that's really gonna take off. And AI is also taking off in the healthcare realm. And so I I don't know that we even know exactly how far we're gonna go with AI. And I think that's one of the concerns that everybody has is AI feels like how VR was a few years ago. This is the wave of the future, this is where we're going, but then we didn't exactly know what we were gonna do with it. I do think that AI can help us get closer to and other forms of technology, can help us kind of bridge that gap that we've had for so many years of knowing simulation is good, but not being able to really truly connect it to patient outcomes. And I think we're gonna find ways in the next few years of being able to look at data in a different way and being able to use healthcare data in a responsible way to be able to track so that we can design simulations and use simulation as a means of continuous improvement with whatever's going on in the clinical setting, which I think is really, really cool. Right. Can you provide an example of that? Every hospital has a good dashboard. Most units or or hospitals as a whole were will have dashboards of how many days has the patient been inpatient, or different sepsis algorithms and things like that. And I think if we could use some of that data that they use for the dashboards for staffing and for understanding what's happening throughout the house or the hospital, I think we could also use that data for simulation. So, okay, we've had a ton of sepsis patients. This month, all of our sims should be based on sepsis. Or, hey, you know, we've had a lot of code blues that we've had shockable rhythms, but they weren't shocked in the first minute. What was the reason there? And do we need to be practicing more simulations that require shockable rhythms? Or is the code cart not close enough to where all the patient rooms are? Or, you know, something like that. So being able to really use that kind of dashboard data that hospitals use for other reasons to be able to use that for designing and developing simulations and a curriculum for different hospitals.

Deb Tauber 12:52

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Translational simulation, once again.

Sarah Beebe 12:57

Yeah, yeah. It's pretty cool when you start. I mean, I love educating. I an educator at heart, but it is pretty cool to see how you can use sim in other ways.

From RCA To Safe Learning

Deb Tauber 13:08

Can you share with our listeners the biggest thing you'd like them to know? Something that when you learn to change the way that you practice, like a personal aha.

Final Takeaways And How To Connect

Sarah Beebe 13:18

Yeah. So I mean, I'd say my most recent one in the past few years has really been that understanding that simulation, yes, has a huge place in education that will never go away. But we can use simulation for testing and improvement. I met a a nurse educator a couple of weeks, well, this past year, and I was talking to her a couple of weeks ago, and they had had a code in their ICU that had not gone well. And so there had been an a root cause analysis or an RCA. They had gone through all of these different things that that could have gone wrong or that could be improved. And then they got to the educator and gave her this performance improvement plan to implement for all of the nurses on the and and staff on the floor. And the staff felt like they were getting slapped on the wrist, you know. It felt it felt punitive when actually, if they had used simulation to reenact the code blue and and walked through it step by step and said, okay, here's where this broke down. Asking them along the way, did you know that this resource was over here, or was it not close enough to you so you couldn't see it? Or were you afraid of doing X, Y, or Z? Approaching it from that perspective, I think would have empowered the staff as opposed to make them feel, oh, well, so okay, the answer is to just educate us more. And we all know that that's not always the case. I mean, yeah, uh training is always important, but but we know that there are so many factors that go into an error or really any medical procedure process that we can't just look at it as being a human error. I mean, it really does. There's so many other components of it.

Deb Tauber 15:12

Well, I think language matters. And to come at a group of people that something happened and to talk about, you know, hey, how can we make this safe? Yeah. Learn from what happened and create a psychologically safe environment and then unpeel the layers of the onion to find out what, who, what, where, when, why, what you can do to get to improve.

Sarah Beebe 15:37

Right. Yeah. Cause I mean, nobody goes to it's like the basic assumption that we know so well. Nobody goes to work to hurt anybody. Like that's never anybody's intention. So with that assumption in mind, what else could be the cause of an error or a breakdown in some sort of process or communication or something like that? There's so many factors involved. And yeah, the language is a big part of that.

Deb Tauber 16:07

Right, right. Are there any final words you'd like to leave our listeners with to remember our conversation?

Closing And Sponsor Message

Sarah Beebe 16:14

If anyone is looking for support in translational simulation, building a program for your health system or wanting to do some sort of additional education related to that, I am, of course, always available. How can our listeners get a hold of you? I am on LinkedIn, Sim Sarah B, so S-I-M, S-A-R-A-H, and then B like My Last Name. And my company is 2Bs Consulting, just like my last name is B B. So my website is 2beesconsulting.com.

Deb Tauber 16:46

And you're gonna be on in the sim affinity group, new to simulation. You're you have volunteered to do a presentation for us, so we can look for you there. Yeah, absolutely. Probably gonna be in February. We'll set have our first meeting with our new to simulation group for our new learners. Uh so we look forward to that. And this has been a wonderful interview, Sarah. I appreciate you and I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely. Happy simulating.

Disclaimer/ intro 17:25

Thanks for joining us here at the Tim Cafe. We hope you enjoyed. Visit us at www.innovative simsolutions.com. And be sure to hit that like and subscribe button so you never miss an episode. Innovative Sim Solutions is your one stop shop for your simulation needs. A turnkey solution.