Self care and wellbeing in the face of COVID-19: Multidisciplinary perspectives and interprofessional experiences.

The human toll which has resulted from the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic is clearly recognised. No single event in recent times has had such profound effects on health services and their staff wellbeing around the world. Policy making has been led by the requirement for confinement and surveillance to limit spread of the disease, and in clinical settings the impact of the necessity for the use of personal protective measures has caused huge strains on practice clinically and professionally. In this paper we share experiences from the pandemic, explore the social and organisational factors at stake and make some suggestions for both personal wellbeing practice and a systems response to the ongoing staff wellbeing challenges of the pandemic.

21st century medical education: critical decision-making guidance through smartphone/tablet applications-the Lothian pilot.

Introduction: In starting a new clinical placement, doctors in training must become aware of and apply standard operating procedures, as well as learn guidelines, simultaneously adjusting to new patient presentations, environments and personnel. This transition is thought to correlate with increased risk to patient safety, notably during the annual UK changeover. Mobile technologies are increasingly commonplace throughout the National Health Service. Clinicians at all levels are employing medical technology and applications (apps) with minimal local guidance. We set out to test the feasibility and utility of offering medical apps to out-of-hours (OOH) practitioners as an aid to clinical decision-making at point of patient contact. The theorised benefits were threefold: clinical education-real time support for clinical decision-making as one component of deliberate practice to build expert performance; decreased administrative burden-updating and accessing current guidelines; and service development-readily accessible feedback from users. Method: We provided 32 devices in our emergency departments and OOH environments. The devices were preloaded with apps approved by our medical education department and clinical service leads to be used in support of care delivery. Results: We surveyed 123 clinical staff prior to the pilot discovering that 65% had used mobile apps to aid their decision-making. During our project, we saw the number of clinical users expand with our data series, suggesting the apps most useful to care delivery for this group of service providers. Future developments: There was huge enthusiasm for the project and we hope to maintain a clinician-led environment.

Education and simulation techniques for improving reliability of care.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Multiple factors influence the dependability of intensive care provision. The management of a group of unstable, critically ill patients requires focused attention from the clinical team. Medical simulation is an important tool to improve safety and team work within the ICU. RECENT FINDINGS: The critical care healthcare team needs to work both individually and together in such a way as to optimise patient care and prevent error. This involves nontechnical skills including decision making, task allocation, team working and situation awareness, all of which are underpinned by communication, cooperation and coordination. The use of integrated simulators to create realistic patient scenarios with structured debriefing is an excellent method for teaching in these domains. There has been a huge increase in the delivery of training and education using an expanding variety of clinical simulators. SUMMARY: This review summarises the evidence and opinion about how simulation tools can be optimally used. In addition, we propose an educational strategy to optimise the impact on clinical practice by embedding simulation training in a multidisciplinary teaching programme based upon a specifically developed curriculum focusing on the teaching of crisis resource management and patient safety.