CILS Hosts Interprofessional Training Event

By | July 24, 2026
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Daemen University’s Center for Interprofessional Learning and Simulation (CILS) hosted an interprofessional training event for Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center emergency room staff on July 14, one of several sessions planned this summer.Woman standing in front of a classroom, with large screens behind her, speaking to attendees seated at tables

Susan Brooks, M.S., B.S.N., R.N., N.E.A.‑B.C., executive vice president and chief nursing officer for Niagara Falls Memorial, and Diane Bessel, PhD LMSW CNM, MSW program director and chair, Social Work and Sociology, led the training session for hospital clinicians and ancillary staff. Woman standing in front of a classroom, with large screens behind her, speaking to attendees seated at tables

Brooks and Bessel shared key points to help participants strengthen their skills for working with each other and with patients to enable them to deal with a multitude of challenging situations.

Bessel reminded participants about the importance of compassion when meeting with patients. “The biggest thing is making the shift from ‘What’s wrong with that person?’ to ‘What happened to that person?’ This is a much more trauma-informed and empathetic approach,” she said.A meeting room with a large monitor on the wall displaying various screens while four people gathered around a long table observe the videos

Participants were introduced to professional actors trained as patients and addressed their immediate needs in separate exam rooms while Brooks, Bessel, and other Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center and Daemen staff assessed their interactions from the CILS observation room.

“There’s such value in learning here. Our clinicians and ancillary staff have so much education on the hands-onSimulated hospital waiting room, with a man seated at a table and a women interacting with two other women who are seated patient care skillsets that they’re trained for. Where they need some additional help is behavioral learning—how to deal with a variety of situations that get more and more complicated each year,” said Brooks. “Simulation-based learning in the CILS is such an innovative idea, and the staff come to understand that we’re not just focusing on the care of the patient or saving their life, but rather the mental health aspect of all of this. And that’s not just the mental health of the patients, but it’s for each other, for the colleagues that we work next to, each and every day.”

To learn more about how students or teams can take part in simulation-based training in the CILS, contact CILS Executive Director Tony Surace at asurace@daemen.edu.