Nearly 50 UIHC personnel participated in the Frames Matter: Feedback simulation exercise last month
Two trainees handle a patient encounter inexplicably poorly. You’re responsible for them. Do you scare them straight, ask if they know what they did wrong, or what?
About 30 residents, fellows, and faculty from the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics Department of Emergency Medicine tackled this issue at an intensive simulation workshop, “Frames Matter: Feedback,” on Dec. 6. They were joined by 18 simulation facilitators from a dozen departments and programs: Anesthesia, Emergency Medicine, Nursing, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Pediatrics, Office of Operations Excellence, Nursing Clinical Education Center, Center for Procedural Skills and Simulation, Emergency Medical Services Learning Resource Center, Office of Consultation and Research in Medical Education, Anesthesia Simulation Center, and Clinical Quality Safety and Performance Improvement.
A similar collaboration occurred within the Department of Anesthesia last year, and another session was delivered for the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology earlier this month.
The workshops with Emergency Medicine and Obstetrics and Gynecology were the largest combination of time and numbers so far -- more than 30 participants and 18-20 instructors for each.
“To get this many people from so many departments to come together for this practice really speaks to the commitment of both the departments and the individual people,” said Paul Leonard, MD, PhD.
Leonard was part of the team that developed the exercise in the UI Hospitals and Clinics Team Simulation Design and Debriefing Workshop. It suddenly grew last January when the UI simulation community collaborated to send a team of eight representatives to present the exercise at the International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH). The team received rave reviews.
Those reviews now seem to be confirmed.
Brooks Obr, MD, an associate in the Department of Emergency Medicine, said participants described the workshop as “an awesome opportunity to learn.” Evaluation forms included comments such as, “Really great feedback session. Should do this every year.”
Facilitators agreed. “It created an opportunity to get to know and work with each other in an area we are all passionate about,” said Kokila Thenuwara, MD. Heather Bair, CRNA, DNP, concurred, adding, “I don’t think you could walk away from it without having some sort of transformative learning.”
The UI simulation community is bringing the workshop back to IMSH in January 2019.