Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
-
Comparative Study
Simulation in a disaster drill: comparison of high-fidelity simulators versus trained actors.
High-fidelity patient simulation provides lifelike medical scenarios with real-time stressors. Mass casualty drills must construct a realistic incident in which providers care for multiple injured patients while simultaneously coping with numerous stressors designed to tax an institution's resources. This study compared the value of high-fidelity simulated patients with live actor-patients. ⋯ This study demonstrated that simulators compared to live actor-patients have equivalent results in prompting critical actions in mass casualty drills and increase the perceived reality of such exercises.
-
Comparative Study
Resident response to integration of simulation-based education into emergency medicine conference.
Utilization of simulation-based training has become increasingly prevalent in residency training. The authors compared emergency medicine (EM) resident feedback for simulation sessions to traditional lectures from an EM residency didactic program. ⋯ Emergency medicine residents scored simulation-based sessions higher than traditional lectures. The scores over time suggest that this preference for simulation can be sustainable long term. Residents perceive simulation as more desirable teaching method compared to the traditional lecture format.
-
The objective was to observe how a workshop using a virtual reality bronchoscopy simulator and computer-based tutorial affects emergency medicine (EM) resident skill in fiber-optic intubation. ⋯ Participation in a simulation-based fiber-optic intubation skill workshop can improve fiber-optic intubation performance rapidly among EM residents. Future research should evaluate if this enhanced performance translates to improved clinical performance in the emergency department (ED).
-
The Institute of Medicine's report "To Err is Human" identified simulation as a means to enhance safety in the medical field, just as flight simulation is used to improve the aviation industry. Yet, while there is evidence that simulation may improve task performance, there is little evidence that simulation actually improves patient outcome. Similarly, simulation is currently used to model teamwork-communication skills for disaster management and critical events, but little research or evidence exists to show that simulation improves disaster response or facilitates intersystem or interagency communication. ⋯ As part of the 2008 Academic Emergency Medicine Consensus Conference on the Science of Simulation, our group sought to identify key research questions that would inform our understanding of simulation's impact at the organizational level. We combined an online discussion group of emergency physicians, an extensive review of the literature, and a "public hearing" of the questions at the Consensus Conference to establish recommendations. The authors identified the following six research questions: 1) what objective methods and measures may be used to demonstrate that simulator training actually improves patient safety? 2) How can we effectively feedback information from error reporting systems into simulation training and thereby improve patient safety? 3) How can simulator training be used to identify disaster risk and improve disaster response? 4) How can simulation be used to assess and enhance hospital surge capacity? 5) What methods and outcome measures should be used to demonstrate that teamwork simulation training improves disaster response? and 6) How can the interface of systems be simulated? We believe that exploring these key research questions will improve our understanding of how simulation affects patient safety, disaster surge capacity, and intersystem and interagency communication.
-
The authors sought to design an integrated theme-based hybrid simulation experience to educate and evaluate emergency medicine (EM) residents, to measure the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) competencies using this simulation model, to measure the impact of the simulation experience on resident performance on written tests, and to measure resident satisfaction with this simulation experience. ⋯ With the use of a highly developed simulation center and an organized, theme-based, hybrid simulation model that takes advantage of multiple simulation modalities, the authors were able to successfully develop an educational model to both train and evaluate EM residents with a high degree of resident satisfaction.