Affinity Groups

The Society for Simulation in Healthcare's Assessment Affinity Group is dedicated to advancing excellence in formative and summative assessment within the field of healthcare simulation. Our mission is to promote the development, dissemination, and implementation of innovative and evidence-based assessment strategies to enhance the effectiveness and impact of healthcare simulation education and training.

The mission of the Disaster simulation Affinity Group is to provide a forum for discussion of ideas, challenges, and solutions related to the simulation of disaster scenarios to improve individual, group, and systemic responses to disasters. It would also seek to appeal to all levels and approaches to disaster simulation, allowing for new and experienced educators from all backgrounds and training to be able to learn, share, and mentor each other. This will allow any willing educator to be able to train their learners in disaster response, despite variations in infrastructure, training, and budget.

Distance simulation, defined as simulation using any modality of simulation (e.g. manikin, SP, tast trainer, VR/ MR, computer, etc) where some or all of the learners and or educators are geographically or socially distanced but learning together, has rapidly become a new method to reach and teach learners when being in the same location is not feasible.

The mission of the Distance Simulation Affinity Group is to provide a forum for educators to discuss distance simulation education and research.

The mission of the Emergency Medical Services Affinity Group is to leverage the power of effective simulation methodologies, emerging technologies and evidence-based practice to help Emergency Medical Services’ professions to accept, adopt, and develop simulation-based education, assessment, research, and health systems integration.

The mission of the Federal Medical Simulation Training Consortium Affinity Group is to provide a forum for educators and operators in the US federal health system (Departments of Defense, Veterans Administration, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security) and healthcare personnel of foreign military organizations to engage in networking, research, and dissemination of best practices in healthcare simulation.

In Situ and Mobile Outreach Simulation 

The mission of the Internal Medicine Affinity Group is to promote and advance medical simulation at all levels of internal medicine/general medicine education for the benefit of patients and practitioners.

The mission of the Low-cost & Low-resource Affinity Group is to enhance patient care by directly addressing the challenges in providing simulation-based training with extremely limited resources.

The Value-Based Simulation Affinity Group seeks to demonstrate and make visible the value that simulation-based interventions provide to healthcare institutions. By creating collaborations between simulation programs already engaged in this work and those new to the process, we will leverage collective expertise and experience in value-based simulation for the betterment of the global healthcare simulation community.