Pediatric heart disease simulation curriculum: Educating the pediatrician

Training guidelines state that pediatricians should be able to diagnose, manage, and triage patients with heart disease. Acutely ill cardiac patients present infrequently and with high acuity, yet residents receive less exposure to acute cardiac conditions than previous generations. Trainees must learn to manage these situations despite this gap. Simulation has been used successfully to train learners to provide acute care. We hypothesized that a simulation-based cardiac curriculum would improve residents' ability to manage cardiac patients.

Pediatric residents completed 4 simulation cases followed by debriefing and a computer presentation reviewing the learning objectives. Subjects returned at 1 month for postintervention cases and again at 4-6 months to measure knowledge retention. Cases were scored by 2 raters using a dichotomous checklist. We used repeated measure ANOVA and effect size to compare groups and intra-class correlation (ICC) to assess inter-rater reliability.

Twenty-five participants were enrolled. Scores were low on pretesting but showed significant improvement (P < .05) in all 4 cases. No decay was noted on late testing. Pre-post effect sizes ranged from 1.1 to 2.1, demonstrating meaningful improvement. Inter-rater reliability (ICC) ranged from 0.61 to 0.93 across cases.

This novel simulation-based curriculum targets a gap in pediatric training and offers an effective way to train pediatricians. We plan to expand this curriculum to new populations of participants and have integrated it into our resident cardiology rotation.