The LRINEC score must be used with caution in diagnosing necrotising fasciitis in diabetic patients. A high index of suspicion is key to the early diagnosis and subsequent management of these patients. Cite this article: Bone Joint J 2016;98-B:1563-8.

Background Improving interprofessional communication and collaboration is necessary to facilitate the early identification and treatment of patients with sepsis. Preparing undergraduate medical and nursing students for the knowledge and skills required to assess, escalate, and manage patients with sepsis is crucial for their entry into clinical practice. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing measures have created the need for interactive distance learning to support collaborative learning. Objective This study aimed to evaluate the effect of sepsis interprofessional education on medical and nursing students’ sepsis knowledge, team communication skills, and skill use in clinical practice. Methods A mixed methods design using a 1-group pretest-posttest design and focus group discussions was used. This study involved 415 undergraduate medical and nursing students from a university in Singapore. After a baseline evaluation of the participants’ sepsis knowledge and team communication skills, they underwent didactic e-learning followed by virtual telesimulation on early recognition and management of sepsis and team communication strategies. The participants’ sepsis knowledge and team communication skills were evaluated immediately and 2 months after the telesimulation. In total, 4 focus group discussions were conducted using a purposive sample of 18 medical and nursing students to explore their transfer of learning to clinical practice. Results Compared with the baseline scores, both the medical and nursing students demonstrated a significant improvement in sepsis knowledge (P<.001) and team communication skills (P<.001) in immediate posttest scores. At the 2-month follow-up, the nursing students continued to have statistically significantly higher sepsis knowledge (P<.001) and communication scores (P<.001) than the pretest scores, whereas the medical students had no significant changes in test scores between the 2-month follow-up and pretest time points (P=.99). A total of three themes emerged from the qualitative findings: greater understanding of each other’s roles, application of mental models in clinical practice, and theory-practice gaps. The sepsis interprofessional education—particularly the use of virtual telesimulation—fostered participants’ understanding and appreciation of each other’s interprofessional roles when caring for patients with sepsis. Despite noting some incongruities with the real-world clinical practice and not encountering many sepsis scenarios in clinical settings, participants shared the application of mental models using interprofessional communication strategies and the patient assessment framework in their daily clinical practice. Conclusions Although the study did not show long-term knowledge retention, the use of virtual telesimulation played a critical role in facilitating the application of mental models for learning transfer and therefore could serve as a promising education modality for sepsis training. For a greater clinical effect, future studies could complement virtual telesimulation with a mannequin-based simulation and provide more evidence on the long-term retention of sepsis knowledge and clinical skills performance.

Background Interprofessional communication (IPC) is integral to interprofessional teams working in the emergency medicine (EM) setting. Yet, the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has laid bare gaps in IPC knowledge, skills and attitudes. These experiences underscore the need to review how IPC is taught in EM. Purpose A systematic scoping review is proposed to scrutinize accounts of IPC programs in EM. Methods Krishna's Systematic Evidence-Based Approach (SEBA) is adopted to guide this systematic scoping review. Independent searches of ninedatabases (PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, Scopus, PsycINFO, ERIC, JSTOR, Google Scholar and OpenGrey) and “negotiated consensual validation” were used to identify articles published between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2020. Three research teams reviewed the data using concurrent content and thematic analysis and independently summarized the included articles. The findings were scrutinized using SEBA's jigsaw perspective and funneling approach to provide a more holistic picture of the data. Results In total 18,809 titles and abstracts were identified after removal of duplicates, 76 full-text articles reviewed, and 19 full-text articles were analyzed. In total, four themes and categories were identified, namely: (a) indications and outcomes, (2) curriculum and assessment methods, (3) barriers, and (4) enablers. Conclusion IPC training in EM should be longitudinal, competency- and stage-based, underlining the need for effective oversight by the host organization. It also suggests a role for portfolios and the importance of continuing support for physicians in EM as they hone their IPC skills. Highlights • IPC training in EM is competency-based and organized around stages. • IPC competencies build on prevailing knowledge and skills. • Longitudinal support and holistic oversight necessitates a central role for the host organization. • Longitudinal, robust, and adaptable assessment tools in the EM setting are necessary and may be supplemented by portfolio use.