The utilization of three-dimensional printing in a simulation-based congenital heart disease and critical care training curriculum is feasible and improves pediatric resident physicians' understanding of a common congenital heart abnormality.

The 3D heart models can be used to enhance congenital cardiac critical care via simulation training of multidisciplinary intensive care teams. Benefit may be dependent on provider type and case complexity.

There are no standard guidelines of how a team should coordinate the efforts of nursing, physicians, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation specialists, surgeons, respiratory therapists, patient care technicians, and unit clerks to emergently execute this complex procedure. Because time is of the essence, it is essential to develop a highly functioning and well-coordinated team with a standardized method of the procedure, its documentation, and communication. Simulation accomplished this for our program. Following these simulation exercises, not only was there a subjectively observed improved coordination and smoother deployment of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation in real-life extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but we have also demonstrated a significantly faster deployment of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as compared with the presimulation era.

Virtual 3D heart models depicting patient-specific CHDs are perceived to improve understanding and postoperative care delivery in the CICU.

BackgroundOptimising team performance is critical in paediatric trauma resuscitation. Previous studies in aviation and surgery link performance to behaviours in the prearrival period.ObjectiveTo determine if patterns of human behaviour in the prearrival period of a simulated trauma resuscitation is predictive of resuscitation performance.DesignTwelve volunteer trauma teams performed in four simulation scenarios in a paediatric hospital. The scenarios were video recorded, transcribed and analysed in 10-second intervals. Variation in the amount of utterances per team member in the prearrival period was compared with team performance and implicit coordination during the resuscitation.Key resultsCoders analysed 18 962 s of video. They coded 5204 team member utterances into one of eight communication behaviour categories. Inter-rater reliability was excellent (an average of 83.1% across all four scenarios). The average number of communications occurring during the prearrival period was 18.84 utterances, with a range of 2–42 and a SD of 9.55. The average length of this period was almost 2 minutes (mean =117.30 s, SD=39.20). Lower variance in team member communication during the prearrival better was associated with better implicit coordination (p=0.011) but not team performance (p=0.054) during the resuscitation.ConclusionPatterns of communication in the prearrival trauma resuscitation period predicted implicit coordination and a trend towards significance for team performance which suggests further studies in such patterns are warranted.