Advances in Simulation

Arunaz Kumar et al present their work on introduction of undergraduate interprofessional education workshop in obstetrics and gynaecology in India. Arunaz and Atul,  have taken simulation based education programs to remote parts of India. In this study, they took a successful undergraduate interprofessional educational initiative called the Women’s Health interprofessional by Simulation (WHIPLS) program for medical and midwifery students to India. The program aims to teach core clinical skills to undergraduate students and embedding interprofessional communication early in their careers. This innovative program in India received a positive response, with some interesting themes emerging from the qualitative analysis of participant data. The key theme was “getting hands-on” experience of doing intimate gynaecological examinations before seeing a real patient. Read more...

The provision of high quality care and training towards this goal, is a central theme of simulation-based education. MacKinnon et al explore the concept of quality in the context of the stabilisation of traumatically injured children. They propose that the ability to assure and improve both simulation training and care provision is impeded without an understanding of quality in this context, and the ability to describe the quality. The challenges of quality measurement are described from a system engineering and a human factors perspective. Read more...

Dr Gabriel Reedy, Editor-in-Chief

Dr Gabriel Reedy is a Reader in Clinical Education in the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine at King’s College London, where he directs the Masters in Clinical Education programme. He is a Chartered Psychologist and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. His research focuses on how healthcare professionals learn and work together, and especially how simulated environments can be used for learning, teaching, and assessment. 

In this article an established trauma simulation program was found to have a profound impact on the relational aspects of care and the development of a collaborative culture across disciplines and departments in a major hospital.

The authors reviewed the program using the Relational Coordination framework – shared knowledge, shared goals, and mutual respect in the context of high-quality communication. They found this framework can provide a common language for simulation educators to design and debrief simulation exercises that aim to have a translational impact. The authors suggest that simulation educators should be deliberate about the foundational team relationships and organizational culture outcomes of the simulation programs they develop.  Read more...

Maurin Söderholm et al highlight an area that is so important for healthcare and that still receives relatively little attention in the simulation world in terms of research: The pre-hospital area. The authors describe the challenges, review what kind of research is available and where the research gaps are, and discuss how to improve the situation. These include the researcher getting into the context and to understand it as well as possible, to use existing and to develop new technology and approaches to do research on patient safety, organizational development, and quality improvement. Finally, they sketch how a laboratory for pre-hospital, simulation-related research might look and what kind of people, you want to hire. Read more...