The COVID pandemic has transformed a traditional health care world into a digital and connected world of communications, collaboration and learning. In the past year, the Amsterdam Skills Centre (ASC) focused on developing streaming education and online learning for a broad group of health care professionals varying from basic laparoscopic surgery training for surgical residents in Kenya to live surgeries for Dutch residents who could not work in the operating rooms due to COVID pressures.
The COVID pandemic has left thousands of patients waiting for elective surgery. In spite of training allied health care professionals at maximal capacity at the hospitals, there are growing shortages of OR-technicians, anesthesia nurses, recovery nurses, radiology technicians and many others. Mobilizing immersive technologies such as VR-simulation, smart glasses and digital learning environments combined with hands on training is required to provide out patients with timely care they all deserve.
The ASC is reaching out to educational and digital partners both within and across Dutch borders to create a consortium which will launch a New Way of Learning curriculum in 2022. This is an exciting next step of the ASC after opening its doors in February 2019.
In thoughtful consideration about this next phase and after five years of building the Amsterdam Skills Centre together with the executive board and an excellent team of professionals, Peter van Felius will explore novel opportunities. As the managing director he helped build the Amsterdam Skills Centre from a spreadsheet in Amsterdam UMC to a successful scaling-up learning platform, yearly educating thousands of surgeons from more than 60 countries. Professor Jaap Bonjer, CEO of the Amsterdam Skills Centre: “Next to his contribution of building the ASC as a successful academic spin-off, Peter has done an excellent job in guiding the ASC through the pandemic and we wish him all the best in his future endeavors”. The ASC will reveal the New Way of Learning in the coming months.