Ageing and Acute Care Physicians' Performance

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Status: Completed

Conditions: Ageing

Treatments: Other: CRM Simulation

Study type: Observational

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT02683447

140-2015

Details and patient eligibility

About

The proportion of older acute care physicians (ACPs) has been increasing. Ageing is associated with physiological changes and research investigating how such age-related physiological changes affect clinical performance is lacking. Specifically, Crisis Resource Management (CRM) consists of essential clinical skills in acute care specialties which when absent, can significantly impact patient safety. As such, the goals of this study are to investigate whether ageing has a correlation with baseline CRM skills of ACPs and whether ageing influences learning from high fidelity simulation.

Full description

The proportion of older acute care physicians (ACP), emergency, critical care & anesthesia, has been steadily increasing. Ageing is associated with physiological changes, which in turn can influence a physician's clinical abilities and decision-making. The litigation and physician disciplinary data suggests that incidents involving all physicians are likely to occur later in practice, with degree of injury identified in the claims being of greater severity. However research, investigating how age-related physiological changes affect clinical performance and patient safety, is lacking.

CRM skills are essential skills within acute care specialties, and are vital for patient safety. CRM encompasses technical skills, as well as a rapid and organized approach to non-technical, cognitive skills such as decision-making, task management, situational awareness and team management. High-fidelity full body mannequin simulation-based education is effective for learning CRM, including transfer of skills from the simulated setting to the clinical setting and improving patient outcome. However, there is a gap in the literature on whether physicians' age influences baseline CRM performance and also learning from simulation-based education.

Although the effectiveness of high-fidelity simulation-based education has been studied extensively in junior learner populations (students, residents, fellows), there are a limited number of studies investigating its effectiveness in teaching CRM in the ageing physician population. In fact, a recent systematic review looking at the role of simulation in continuing medical education (CME) in ACPs supported that there is limited evidence supporting improved learning. Despite not knowing whether simulation is the correct tool in an ageing population, it is being recommended as a training, regulation and assessment tool for practicing physicians.

Objectives:

The goals of this study are to:

Investigate whether ageing has a correlation with baseline CRM skills of ACPs using simulated crisis scenarios and Assess whether ageing influences learning from high fidelity simulation.

Enrollment: 48 patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Emergency physicians
• Critical care physicians
• Anesthesiologists
• minimum 5 years of practice post-residency

Exclusion criteria

• Post-call day of participation

Trial design

48 participants in 1 patient group

CRM Simulation

Description:

Each participant will manage a PEA arrest scenario (pre-test) and then be debriefed on their CRM skills by a trained facilitator for 20 minutes. They will then manage another crisis scenario (PEA arrest with a different inciting event) as an immediate post-test. Three months afterwards participants will return to manage a third PEA arrest scenario, which will serve as a retention post-test.

Treatment:

Other: CRM Simulation