International Journal of Healthcare Simulation

Background:

Pressure from the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare has had a detrimental effect on the delivery of teaching to junior doctors. During a time when teaching is needed more than ever the constraints of a pandemic have made this challenging. Parallel to this patient safety remains a cause for concern in healthcare systems worldwide ^[1]. Incident reporting is recognized as a key tool for improving patient safety and learning from such incidents is a fundamental part of improving patient care and safety ^[1]. The need to address recurring significant incidents (SIs) on the Acute Medical Unit (AMU) at Hull Royal Infirmary (HRI) was identified. With the pandemic placing pressure on departments to rethink teaching an opportunity to develop a simulation-based induction video integrating lessons learnt from SIs presented itself. Incorporating technologies like Video Reality 360 (VR360) into traditional teaching methods have shown to produce a more effective teaching tool in the medical education field ^[2].

Aim:

The aim of the study was to create an educational programme for the acute medical unit to allow flexibility of learning whilst incorporating key lessons from significant incidents.

Method/design:

Our initial approach was to gain an understanding of the problem by consulting the multi-disciplinary team. We spoke with a range of healthcare professionals working on the acute medical unit to identify concerns relating to SIs: in particular, the governance lead was key in this. Following this, we consulted junior doctors using questionnaires to explore the challenges they faced working on AMU. The design of the scenarios is based around two SIs per scenario for a total of five scenarios and all scenarios were based around the management of common conditions seen on AMU. We opted for an interactive ward round style teaching with a particular focus on key skills such as prescribing and taking bloods. With the help of our colleagues at Hull Institute of Learning & Simulation (HILS) the scenarios were filmed in 1 day and later edited to produce a short video.

Implementation outline:

We have designed and created a VR360 teaching programme that combines with departmental induction allowing junior doctors to access learning from anywhere in the world and immerse themselves on AMU. Feedback has been positive so far and we hope to expand this simulation-based learning to allow to include additional topics.