Selected abstracts from the 25th Annual Meeting of the Society in Europe for Simulation Applied to Medicine

Abstract

A1 Can simulation based training for emergency medical teams improve patient safety? A systematic literature review Kjetil Torgeirsen SAFER, Stavanger, Norway Correspondence: Kjetil Torgeirsen (kjetil.torgeirsen@dabb.no) Introduction & Aims Health care is often organized as inter-professional team-work. Most health care professionals have little or no knowledge or training in how to get teams to work from their education. Most of the nontechnical skills are rarely practiced in isolation by any health care professional even though it is pointed out that nontechnical skills can mitigate risk of errors or adverse events. Characteristics of emergency medical teamwork is; complex, uncontrolled situations/scenes, high levels of stress and high stakes. These factors can individually increase the risk of errors and adverse events and when present together the risk increases. It is important to use highly efficient tools to reduce this risk. Research question: Can simulation based training for emergency medical teams improve outcomes and patient safety? Methods A systematic literature review was conducted based on a PICO analysis with assistance from a librarian searching Medline and Embase. Inclusion criteria for the abstracts were based on a PICO analysis; Population; clinicians in some kind of emergency situation and multidisciplinary teams. Educational articles with student populations were excluded as they are not likely to measure patient outcome. Intervention – simulation based training. Outcome/endpoints: impact on patient outcome (reduced risk of errors or reduced mortality) Kirkpatrick level 4 (K4). Results & Discussion Of the initial 164 studies, 18 studies met the inclusion criteria. 6 of the included studies were systematic literature reviews conducted in the period 2010 - 2014. 10 single studies found impact on K4 level and mortality. There seems to be an increasing number of studies proving reduced mortality after simulation based training intervention. Previous literature reviews do not include new studies, and have missed important studies. The findings from this literature search indicate a potential huge impact on patient outcome with several studies reporting of 18 – 50% reduced mortality rates and also for other indicators for patient safety. The other main finding in this review article is the lack of reporting guidelines for medical simulation studies and the difficulties of getting an overview over the research in this field. None of the included studies involve pre-hospital health care providers or teams, but medical emergencies and interdisciplinary teams. Ethics Statement This study did not require formal ethics approval because it was a literature review.