Interprofessional Simulation Olympics as a platform to assess team work knowledge acquisition

Several years ago an on-stage competition called SimWars was introduced to the simulation community. This concept was adopted into a patient safety course as a way to further engage students and named Sim Olympics. We sought to evaluate it as a platform for assessment of learning in students who participated as audience members.

A non-equivalent groups design was used to assess whether students could be taught to recognise features of effective teamwork, including a pair of expert raters. One-way repeated measures analysis of variance was used to compare students' attitudes toward interprofessional education (IPE) education, teamwork and simulation, before and after the course.

Student scores compared to expert scores showed good agreement. For team 1 there were no statistical differences noted (M=19.58, SD=4.34 given by the students, M=17.50, SD=2.12 given by the experts), t (192)=1.26, p=0.264. There was also no difference for team 2 (M=15.173, SD=5.52 given by the students, M=19.50, SD=3.53 given by the experts), t (173)=0.863, p=0.354. A premeasure and postmeasure of students' attitudes towards IPE education, teamwork and simulation, also showed significant time effect, p<0.001.

Medical and nursing students were able to demonstrate their learning of teamwork dynamics by discerning differences between great teamwork and good teamwork as proficiently as seasoned experts. Findings of this study may further support the use of observation as a method to evaluate learning.