Interdisciplinary Health and Community Services Simulation Centre

The RRC Polytechnic Interdisciplinary Health and Community Services Simulation Centre offers high-quality, flexible, simulation-based learning environments for nursing, allied health, and paramedicine students. It provides a safe hands-on learning environment where students experience real-life scenarios, develop essential skills, clinical reasoning, and improve teamwork without endangering patients, building competence in the next generation of front-line healthcare workers. Located on the Notre Dame campus on the 4th floor of Building A, a 1960’s building that received a deep energy retrofit in the late 90’s reducing the windows to small punched openings, limiting connection to the campus, poor internal circulation, no study space, limiting a sense of community, and outmoded learning spaces. The brief was to renovate the perimeter classrooms with a fundamental repurposing of the space, including advanced technologies, lighting, and infrastructure upgrades to accommodate the simulation environment, and current learning styles. The initial program included an apartment, two low-fidelity and three high-fidelity simulation labs, each with a control room and functioning headwalls, prep rooms for each high-fidelity lab, paramedicine lab, four debrief rooms, a triage station, exam room, quiet room, prep/storage, AV room, and staff room. The 4th floor is organized around a linear central service core flanked by corridors on each side, divided by a theatre, with a perimeter of classrooms. The new plan extends the east-west corridors to the building's perimeter, complete with new floor-to-ceiling windows connecting the floor to the campus on the west. In the middle, perimeter classrooms were removed, and the theatre separated from the core, establishing an open, light-filled public square around the theatre, an agora, complete with a new student lounge and a flexible debrief room providing collaboration opportunities for students in an unstructured learning commons. Entrances to the renovated theatre are enlarged, aligned with the northeast-west corridor, and fully glazed to enhance visual connection and wayfinding. Simulated learning environments place students in high-pressure situations as they prepare for real-life scenarios, often causing immense emotional strain. In preparation for these experiences, the simulation program was conceived as distinct interdisciplinary nursing simulation and paramedicine suites, each defined by a threshold separating simulated worlds from the real one. The simulation suite is distinguished by two teal coloured portals, while the remainder of the simulation and support spaces, including the theatre, are accessed through black portals in contrast to the surroundings. To create a holistic learning environment welcoming and considerate of Canada’s First Peoples, RRC Polytech invited an Elder-in-residence to support students and staff and provide opportunities for knowledge sharing. The facility includes an Elders room, spaces for smudging ceremonies, and Cedar baths. Local Metis artist Christine Kirouac was commissioned to create large-scale colored pencil drawings of indigenous plants known for their healing properties, which were printed on wall coverings. The art is thoughtfully located in Debrief Rooms named for the plants in them, across from Triage, and in the Quiet Room, creating opportunities for students and staff to learn and grow in their understanding of alternative medicine and healing, and Indigenous ways of knowing.