Article Text
Abstract
Aims/Objectives/Background Emergency Medicine is a unique speciality often meeting people at the worse moments of their life. Death is an everyday occurrence, and with that comes the skills needed to talk to patients and families about when their end of life may be nearing. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine’s guideline suggests doctors need to have the skills to talk to these patients. We developed a full day course called SimPall which is incorporates some lecture-based teaching, and then in-situ simulation within the emergency department. Our aim was to gather feedback to see what educational benefit this brought to our EM staff.
Methods/Design Following some teaching around difficult conversations, do not attempt cardio pulmonary resuscitation and managing palliative emergencies we then gave the participants all 3 of our in-situ simulations, in two groups. The participants were not aware of what simulations they got. The three simulations based on real ED patients were; Scenario 1 was the end stage COPD patient who is not for any further interventions. Scenario 2 is of a very frail patient, with pneumonia who has multiple comorbidities. Scenario 3 was a massive upper gastrointestinal bleed with known oesophageal cancer. All participants were debriefed, and feedback recorded. All participants were offered the chance to discuss with a senior if they had any worries about the scenarios.
Results/Conclusions This teaching day was in April 2019. 13 people including doctors and advanced nurse practitioners attended the day. All were involved in each of the scenarios and their feedback was collated. Overall the feedback for all the simulations was positive. 76% of participants felt their knowledge had improved from lacking confidence to being fairly or very confident after the simulations. Written comments suggest that participants feel they would benefit from more teaching and exposure of this. We are looking at repeating this day.