What are the measures that can be used to assess performance during in situ Paediatric Emergency Medicine Simulation?

Paediatric in situ simulation within emergency departments is growing in popularity as an approach for improving multidisciplinary team working, enabling clinical skills development and exploring the importance of human factors in the clinical setting. However, measuring the success of such programmes is often through participant feedback of satisfaction and not measures of performance, which makes it difficult to assess whether such programmes lead to improvements in clinical behaviour.

To identify the measures that can be used to assess performance during in situ paediatric emergency medicine simulations.

A literature search of EMBASE, ERIC and MEDLINE was performed using the key terms (Paediatrics and Emergency and Simulation.) MeSH and subheadings were used to ensure all possible variations of the key terms were included within the search.

The search revealed 607 articles, with 16 articles meeting inclusion criteria. Three themes of evaluation strategy were identified-the use of feedback forms (56% n=9/16), performance evaluation methods (63% n=10/16) or other strategies (25% n=4/16), which included provider comfort scores, latent safety threat identification and episodes of suboptimal care and their causation.

The most frequently used method of assessment in paediatric emergency department simulation are performance evaluation methods. None of the studies in this area have looked at patient level outcomes and this is therefore an area which should be explored in the future.