International Journal of Healthcare Simulation

Background and aim:

The past three years during Covid19 have brought significant changes to our simulation service, including a change of specialist extended faculty. As we began to resume our standard service, and new faculty members joined the team, it became apparent that we had been heavily reliant on individual faculty memory and had lost some organizational memory. This impacted the efficiency and quality of the service, as well as the experience for the new staff members. Therefore, we decided to evaluate all our courses to identify opportunities that would improve the overall service and help integrate new faculty.

Activity:

We initially used a scoping exercise based on the System Engineering Initiative in Patient Safety (SEIPS) framework [1] to evaluate all our courses looking at course design, scenario design, evaluation tools and course delivery to highlight themes for service improvement. Potential service improvement ideas were prioritized taking into consideration the Hierarchy of Intervention Effectiveness to ensure improvements were mixed across the person and system-focused levels [2].

Findings:

The SEIPS scoping exercise highlighted inconsistency in course design, delivery and evaluation. As a team we set about designing a standardized approach that could be applied to both established and new courses, aiming to enable course resilience and retain valuable knowledge and documentation.

We have designed and embedded standardization in all aspects of course design, delivery and evaluation:

SEIPS based scenario design proforma

Course introduction with a human factors workshop

Incivility workshop

Technical teaching aid for debriefing

Human factors teaching tools

Pre- and post-course evaluation

Anonymized feedback from faculty was used to assess the impact of the standardized course design. This standardized approach has supported existing and new faculty to develop and run high quality courses; created a shared understanding of teaching content and delivery, and has had a positive impact on the consistency of course quality.

Conclusion:

By scoping and exploring our service we illuminated gaps within our organizational memory and were able to strengthen these by designing a series of innovative documents, proformas, teaching aides and evaluation. This standardized approach helps to enable consistent high quality, support new faculty, whilst still allowing for flexibility and adaptations when delivering courses.

Ethics statement:

Authors confirm that all relevant ethical standards for research conduct and dissemination have been met. The submitting author confirms that relevant ethical approval was granted, if applicable.