PG76 Remote Simulation

Abstract

When Covid-19 hit, all student placements were suspended. Whilst some students were given honorary employment contracts, others had to isolate to care for families, or shield. This created anxiety from those at home, worried that they would be left behind with their learning. They were still able to have remote teaching from their lecturers, so we looked to add some remote simulation (sim) to this. Through an online learning platform, we were able to share the audio-visual directly from the sim suite. Students could talk in real time into the sim suite. Due to social distancing, we invited only two employed students to physically be in the sim suite for the session, with everyone else participating remotely. One remote learner was nominated to lead each sim, as if running a scenario in a ‘hands-off’ style. The nominated remote learner could ask questions directly to the patient and act on the responses. The two employed students acted as team members, taking a blood pressure and listening to the chest, under the instruction of the remote leader. Summary of Results We have made changes throughout, such as the number of participants or who should talk out loud and lead. Feedback has been constructive and has helped guide some of these changes over the weeks, it’s also been overwhelmingly positive and attendance has been high. Discussion, Conclusions and Recommendations Studies addressing ‘remote simulation’ currently only refer to the facilitator being remote (Hayden, 2012) and participants on the whole are physically present in educational facilities (Ikeyama, 2012). We will be continuing this method of sim and it’s likely to be a method we will adopt to complement hands-on sim. We are trialling varying numbers of participants to find the optimal number; currently we invite 15 remote learners. We ironed-out initial issues such as audio quality and session format. This method allows for social distancing and reduced travelling between sites. It could also allow more students access to sim, if larger group sizes prove to be effective. Feedback suggests that it should be used to supplement in-person sim rather than replace it, as in-person sim allows for the practice of hands on skills and inter-personal interactions. References Hayden E, Navedo D, Gordon J. Web-conferenced simulation sessions: a satisfaction survey of clinical simulation encounters via remote supervision. Telemedicine journal and e-health 2012:18 (7);p525–529. Ikeyama T, Shimizu N, Ohta K. Low-cost and ready-to-go remote-facilitated simulation-based learning. Simulation in healthcare 2012;7(1); p35–39.