Harry Owen

Professor Harry Owen is an academic anesthesiologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia with around 100 peer reviewed research publications. For several years Harry's research focus has been the history of simulation and some of this work has been published in clinical, education and simulation journals and presented at national and international meetings and Harry is writing a comprehensive history of simulation to be published in 2015.
Simulation was widely used in health professional education for more than 250 years and in the 18th and 19th centuries there were national simulation courses, mobile simulation units, simulators for general skills training and task trainers, lung and heart sound simulators, high-fidelity simulators and pocket simulator, simulators that could bleed, and a global industry for making, maintaining, updating and repairing simulators. In the first half of the 19th century a change in the way students in Europe were taught using simulation resulted in thousands of deaths.
Developments early in the 20th century included surgical team-based scenarios, simulators for practicing resuscitation and objective structured assessment of team-based care in trauma management. The second half of the 20th century was notable only for the decline in simulation in healthcare.