Assessment of Debriefing Experiences of Emergency Medical Professionals in Remote Simulation and Standardized Patients

Abstract

INTRODUCTION:

Clinical training of medical students during their formative years of graduation and post-graduation forms the basis of their future clinical practice. Hands-on practice and bed-side teaching form the cornerstones of effective clinical education, but recently the utilization of simulation based medical education, is growing at a fast pace.

Students are exposed to Simulated Clinical Experiences (SCE’s) in a safe and controlled environment. Simulation based training has been found to be a better tool than didactic teaching for medical graduate students to learn critical assessment and life-saving skills.Emergency Medicine requires expert and skilled professionals to handle critical situations with instantaneous decision making in order to save a patient’s life.Reflective debriefing helps learners tackle real life emergencies more effectively.

OBJECTIVE:

To compare debriefing experiences of Emergency Medical Professionals after sessions in remote simulation and standardized patients.

METHODOLOGY:

Only those EMPs who had not been exposed to simulation, debriefing and ITLS sessions in the past participated in the study. The Facilitator demonstrated the skills to the participants and written patient assessment algorithms were distributed for better understanding.

The EMPs were randomly assigned into two groups A and B. Group A was exposed to Standardized Patients (SP) Simulation while Group B was exposed to Remote Manikin Simulation.

CONCLUSION:

Remote Simulation has been largely successful as it is reiterated by the high satisfaction scores in our study. Nevertheless, in-person SP simulation, provided a richer debriefing experience to the learners.