Improving patient safety through better teamwork: how effective are different methods of simulation debriefing? Protocol for a pragmatic, prospective and randomised study
type: Article
item type: journalArticle
is part of: BMJ Open
authors: Person
  surname: Freytag
  given name: J.
authors: Person
  surname: Stroben
  given name: F.
authors: Person
  surname: Hautz
  given name: W. E.
authors: Person
  surname: Eisenmann
  given name: D.
authors: Person
  surname: Kammer
  given name: J. E.
subject: *Clinical Competence
subject: *Quality Improvement
subject: Cooperative Behavior
subject: Humans
subject: Medical Errors/*prevention & control
subject: Patient Care Team/organization & administration/*standards
subject: Patient Safety/*standards
subject: Prospective Studies
subject: Research Design
subject: Simulation Training
subject: accident and emergency medicine
subject: adult intensive and critical care
subject: consultancy from the AO Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland. All other authors report
subject: medical education and training
subject: no competing interests.
abstract: INTRODUCTION: Medical errors have an incidence of 9% and may lead to worse patient outcome. Teamwork training has the capacity to significantly reduce medical errors and therefore improve patient outcome. One common framework for teamwork training is crisis resource management, adapted from aviation and usually trained in simulation settings. Debriefing after simulation is thought to be crucial to learning teamwork-related concepts and behaviours but it remains unclear how best to debrief these aspects. Furthermore, teamwork-training sessions and studies examining education effects on undergraduates are rare. The study aims to evaluate the effects of two teamwork-focused debriefings on team performance after an extensive medical student teamwork training. METHODS AND ANALYSES: A prospective experimental study has been designed to compare a well-established three-phase debriefing method (gather-analyse-summarise; the GAS method) to a newly developed and more structured debriefing approach that extends the GAS method with TeamTAG (teamwork techniques analysis grid). TeamTAG is a cognitive aid listing preselected teamwork principles and descriptions of behavioural anchors that serve as observable patterns of teamwork and is supposed to help structure teamwork-focused debriefing. Both debriefing methods will be tested during an emergency room teamwork-training simulation comprising six emergency medicine cases faced by 35 final-year medical students in teams of five. Teams will be randomised into the two debriefing conditions. Team performance during simulation and the number of principles discussed during debriefing will be evaluated. Learning opportunities, helpfulness and feasibility will be rated by participants and instructors. Analyses will include descriptive, inferential and explorative statistics. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The study protocol was approved by the institutional office for data protection and the ethics committee of Charite Medical School Berlin an…
date: 2017-07-02
pages: e015977
coverage: 28667224

BMJ Open
type: Journal
volume: 7
number: 6
identifier: DOI 10.1136/bmjopen-2017-015977
identifier: ISSN 2044-6055 (Electronic) 2044-6055 (Linking)