Introduction
Emergencies in the pediatric primary care office are high-risk, low-frequency events that offices may be ill-prepared to manage. We developed an intervention to improve pediatric primary care office emergency preparedness involving a baseline measurement, a customized report out with action plans for improvement (based on baseline measures), and a plan to repeat measurement at 6 months. This article reports on the baseline measurement.
Methods
This baseline measurement consisted of 2 components: preparedness checklists and in situ simulations. The preparedness checklists were completed in person to measure compliance with the American Academy of Pediatrics Policy Statement: preparation for emergencies in the offices of pediatricians and pediatric primary care providers, in the domains of equipment, supplies, medication, and guidelines. Two in situ simulations, a child in respiratory distress and a child with a seizure, were conducted with the offices' interprofessional teams; performance was scored using checklists.
Results
Baseline measurements were conducted in 12 pediatric offices from October to December 2018. Wide variability was noted for compliance with the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations (range = 47%–87%) and performance during in situ simulations (range = 43%–100%).
Conclusions
Pediatric primary care office emergency preparedness was found to be variable. Simulation can be used to augment existing measures of emergency preparedness, such as checklists. By using simulation to measure office emergency preparedness, areas of knowledge deficit and latent safety threats were identified and are being addressed through ongoing collaboration.
Introduction: To understand the baseline quality of team communication behaviors at our organization, we implemented institution-wide simulation training and measured the performance of safety behaviors of ad hoc teams in emergent situations. Methods: Clinicians participated in 2 interprofessional video-recorded simulation scenarios, each followed by debriefing. Using a standardized evaluation instrument, 2 reviewers independently evaluated the presence or absence of desired team safety behaviors, including escalating care, sharing a mental model, establishing leadership, thinking out loud, and identifying roles and responsibilities. We also scored the quality of sharing the mental model, closed-loop communication, and overall team performance on a 7-point scale. Discordant reviews were resolved with scoring by an additional reviewer. Results: A total of 1404 clinicians participated in 398 simulation scenarios, resulting in 257 usable videos. Overall, teams exhibited desired behaviors at the following frequencies: escalating care, 85%; sharing mental models, 66%; verbally establishing leadership, 6%; thinking out loud, 87%; and identifying roles and responsibilities, 27%. Across all reviews, the quality of the graded behaviors (of 7 points) was 2.8 for shared mental models, 3.3 for closed-loop communication, and 3.2 for overall team performance. Conclusions: In a simulation setting with ad hoc teams, there was variable performance on completing safety behaviors and only a fair quality of graded communication behaviors. These results establish a baseline assessment of communication and teamwork behaviors and will guide future quality improvement interventions.
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