Consortium, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH, USA *Corresponding author, email: garth.horsten@gmail.com Background: At level one hospitals in South Africa a high annual number of maternal deaths occur due to the unrecognised/ untreated complications of spinal anaesthesia. The authors developed a clinical scenario and scoring system to measure intern performance in managing hypotension and cardiac arrest during spinal anaesthesia for caesarean section on a human patient simulator. This system was then subjected to tests of validity and reliability. Methods: The simulator-based clinical scenario was developed by two specialist anaesthesiologists. A modified Delphi technique was used to achieve consensus among 10 anaesthetic specialists regarding a standardised scoring system. A total of 20 medical officers with a Diploma in Anaesthesiology and 20 interns completed the scenario and were scored by two senior anaesthesiologists. Results: Medical officers scored an average of 252 and 246 points, whereas interns scored an average of 216 and 215 points (p = 0.005 and p = 0.013, respectively). The scoring instrument demonstrated high inter-assessor reliability with an intra-class correlation coefficient of 0.983.
Conclusions:The scoring tool was shown to be valid and reliable. It offers a standardised assessment process and may be used to refine institutional intern training programmes, with a view to improving anaesthesia skills in community service medical officers.Keywords: anaesthesia spinal, caesarean section, internship, residency, simulation, simulator
BackgroundSouth Africa has a high annual number of anaesthetic maternal deaths. The majority of these occur at level one hospitals due to the unrecognised/untreated complications of spinal anaesthesia.
1These hospitals provide generalist services to inpatients and outpatients, who have ideally been referred from a community health centre or clinic.2 Research has shown a lack of training, experience and supervision in anaesthesia at these hospitals, 3 and that community service doctors (CSMOs), in their first year of practice after internship training, are required to provide obstetric anaesthesia without supervision. 4 Research has previously indicated that internship training (a two-year training period of doctors who have completed their undergraduate medical degree but do not yet have a licence to practise medicine unsupervised) inadequately prepares CSMOs to fulfil this role.5 Assessment of internship training programmes and intern performance at the end of their training is therefore critical.Simulation assessments offer a means of assessing performance without the risk of direct patient harm. 6,7 However, for any assessment tool to have wider applicability it needs to be validated and reproducible. Previous studies have developed valid and reliable simulator-based assessment tools for the measurement of trainee doctor performance in providing anaesthesia in simulated environments.8,9 Such tools have not been developed within South Africa. The objectives of...