Happy New Year to you all!

In the middle of our normal, extreme hustle ahead of IMSH 2024 in San Diego, I wanted to pause and wish everyone in the healthcare simulation community the best as we forge straight into a new year.

*pause* *breathe in, breathe out*

Okay, back to the exciting events at hand, beginning, of course, with IMSH 2024!

We all will be on site in San Diego for the International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare 2024 in just a few, short weeks! I can’t shout praises loud enough about the SSH Staff, the IMSH 2024 Planning Team, key event sponsors, the dozens of contractor partners, and more than 140+ exhibiting companies who have all, again, planned and built what I think is going to make for one of the best IMSH events ever. 

Just seeing the incredible interest throughout the year - from more than 1,000 content submissions back in the spring, to many early exhibition hall sales, to registrations trending earlier than ever - I can’t wait for all attendees to see the final product January 20-24! (I know you’re all coming, the numbers say this is trending toward the largest attendee number and largest Exhibition Hall in IMSH - and therefore all of healthcare simulation - history!)

What’s that mean?

It means if you haven’t registered yet, NOW would be the right time. It means hotel space is fast filling up. It means hot tickets to events like Saturday evening’s President’s Diamond Ball are quickly selling out. It means that one session you might need to find that one IDEA that lifts your program in 2024 - it might be filling up. It means you aren’t ready to see our four amazing keynote speakers OR the additional afternoon SSH Fellows Main Stage Presentations (Monday and Tuesday) So, get signed up!

Once registered, or if you are already, the IMSH 2024 Session Scheduler AND IMSH 2024 App (Apple and Android) are available!

On site, you all will be immersed in the IDEA theme - Innovate. Disseminate. Educate. Advocate. - and the positive ramifications expected from that are something that resonate with me because, while it wasn’t a direct correlation, each of those pieces also permeate the brand new strategic plan developed this year by the SSH Board of Directors - especially Advocacy. 

We’ll share the details of that plan with you first at IMSH, but I will say advocacy is such a critical component to the growth we want to see for all of healthcare simulation going forward. We all can advocate for ourselves as professionals in the healthcare sector. We all can advocate for the incredible importance simulation has - or SHOULD HAVE - in initial and ongoing development of our healthcare workforce. And, of course, we all can advocate for simulation’s impact, ultimately, in enhancing patient safety. It’s why we’re here at all, right?

So, please look for that information at IMSH (and after) as we push the new plan outward through the work done at every level from our Board, our Committees, Special Interest Groups, Sections, future Working Groups and Task Forces, and our Staff. We’re all in on pushing SSH and healthcare simulation forward and want you to be a part of what I think is a very bright future!

While thinking about the future, we can’t forget our past.

SSH officially turns 20 this year! The Society was incorporated in 2004 and has seen so much in terms of its growth (to more than 5,000 members worldwide!), its offerings for individual professionals (CHSE and CHSOS weren’t always a thing!) and programs (SSH Accreditation now has more than 250 proud members in its family!), and its resources such as the Healthcare Simulation Dictionary and Simulationist Code of Ethics. It is simply mind-blowing to think about how some like-minded conversations and professional visions 20 years ago have become everything we see and do today.

And to be the Executive Director of such a vibrant, critically important Society at this point in time… Talk about humbling…

I can’t imagine a better place to be professionally, and I’m as honored today to be here as I was my first day. Thank you to all of you who continue to make this dream a reality. Thank you to our leadership, our key volunteer leaders throughout SSH, and to you all for helping make the healthcare simulation community the best community and SSH the leader it is in it. 

Let’s go rock 2024.

See you in San Diego!

Jennifer Manos, MBA, MSN, RN
SSH Executive Director