Intensive Care Unit Critical Incident Analysis as an Objective Tool to Select Content for a Simulation Curriculum

The intensive care unit (ICU) offers a unique environment where emergency events are frequent, high-stakes, and carefully documented, which makes it an ideal setting to research the specific technical skills, which are deployed during such events. This study aimed to describe a method of objectively identifying skills and scenarios, which should be prioritized for inclusion in a simulation curriculum.

A retrospective audit of all available critical incident data (11 months) from a 36-bed tertiary ICU was performed. Code blue events were analyzed. Data were coded according to a rubric based on Le Guen and Costa-Pinto ( Intern Med J. 2020;51(8):1298-1303) tallying the occurrence of common ICU scenarios and skills.Documentation of each event was analyzed. The frequency with which a skill or scenario appeared in these events was considered as "high frequency" if it occurred in more than 20% of the events.The trainees' confidence in a particular skill was assessed by means of a self-assessment survey questionnaire (based on an anchored 6-item rating scale).

One hundred twenty-one incidents were analyzed. Sixteen were eliminated because of insufficient documentation. The most common skills during these emergency events were familiarity with the advanced life support trolley (34% of events), electrocardiogram (ECG) rhythm strip interpretation (32.4%), and the operation of an external defibrillator (29.5%).Most trainees surveyed are preparing to undergo training in anesthesia (58%) or intensive care (28%). Specialized areas of expertise (troubleshooting an extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) circuit or intra-aortic balloon pump) had the lowest confidence scores (average scores of 0.81 and 0.72).

We highlighted a novel, reproducible, and objective methodology by which critical incident data can be integrated with trainee self-assessment to generate a targeted simulation curriculum.