Article Text
Abstract
Introduction Medical errors have an incidence of 9% and may lead to worse patient outcome. Teamwork training has the capacity to significantly reduce medical errors and therefore improve patient outcome. One common framework for teamwork training is crisis resource management, adapted from aviation and usually trained in simulation settings. Debriefing after simulation is thought to be crucial to learning teamwork-related concepts and behaviours but it remains unclear how best to debrief these aspects. Furthermore, teamwork-training sessions and studies examining education effects on undergraduates are rare. The study aims to evaluate the effects of two teamwork-focused debriefings on team performance after an extensive medical student teamwork training.
Methods and analyses A prospective experimental study has been designed to compare a well-established three-phase debriefing method (gather–analyse–summarise; the GAS method) to a newly developed and more structured debriefing approach that extends the GAS method with TeamTAG (teamwork techniques analysis grid). TeamTAG is a cognitive aid listing preselected teamwork principles and descriptions of behavioural anchors that serve as observable patterns of teamwork and is supposed to help structure teamwork-focused debriefing. Both debriefing methods will be tested during an emergency room teamwork-training simulation comprising six emergency medicine cases faced by 35 final-year medical students in teams of five. Teams will be randomised into the two debriefing conditions. Team performance during simulation and the number of principles discussed during debriefing will be evaluated. Learning opportunities, helpfulness and feasibility will be rated by participants and instructors. Analyses will include descriptive, inferential and explorative statistics.
Ethics and dissemination The study protocol was approved by the institutional office for data protection and the ethics committee of Charité Medical School Berlin and registered under EA2/172/16. All students will participate voluntarily and will sign an informed consent after receiving written and oral information about the study. Results will be published.
- medical education and training
- accident and emergency medicine
- adult intensive and critical care
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Footnotes
Contributors JF and FS translated the TEAM, designed the study and will be responsible for conduction. DE, WEH and JEK contributed to the study design. JEK supervised the study design and will supervise conduction. JF and FS are responsible for data analyses. JF, FS and JEK wrote the manuscript. JF and FS conducted the prestudy. DE is responsible for funding and local administration at Charité Medical School Berlin and heads the steering committee. All authors carefully read the manuscript, made critical and substantial revisions, and gave their approval for publication.
Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. The investigators JF and FS are funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF). The sponsor did not interfere with the conception and conduction of the study, data analysis or production of the manuscript.
Competing interests WEH received financial compensation for educational consultancy from the AO Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland. All other authors report no competing interests.
Ethics approval Ethics committee of Charité Medical School Berlin.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.