Analysis of the use of a mobile simulation unit using the principles of a managed educational network.

Introduction: One of the challenges of delivering safe, reliable, quality health care is ensuring the workforce have access to the right training at the right time wherever they are practising. Like other high reliability fields, healthcare education has recognised the important role of simulation based education in embedding a culture of readiness for practice. Managed clinical networks (MCNs) have a proven track record in enhancing services for patients.

Is the 'never event' concept a useful safety management strategy in complex primary healthcare systems?

Why Is The Area Important?: A sub-group of rare but serious patient safety incidents, known as 'never events,' is judged to be 'avoidable.' There is growing interest in this concept in international care settings, including UK primary care. However, issues have been raised regarding the well-intentioned coupling of 'preventable harm' with zero tolerance 'never events,' especially around the lack of evidence for such harm ever being totally preventable.

Pharmacists' experiences and perceptions about simulation use for learning and development of clinical skills in Kuwait.

Background There has been a worldwide exponential rise in simulation use in health professions education. Most of the evidence about simulation-based education (SBE) comes from Western educational systems. Little is known about simulation use in the education and training of pharmacy students and pharmacists in the Middle Eastern countries.

Validity and reliability of metrics for translation of regional anaesthesia performance from cadavers to patients.

Background: Our goal is to develop metrics that quantify the translation of performance from cadavers to patients. Our primary objective was to develop steps and error checklists from a Delphi questionnaire. Our second objective was to show that our test scores were valid and reliable.

Simulation for Continuing Pharmacy Education: Development and Implementation of a Simulation-Based Workshop on Medicines Reconciliation for Pharmacists.

Introduction: Simulation has been increasingly used to train health care professionals on clinical skills. Little is published on simulation-based education in the context of continuing pharmacy education (CPE) of pharmacists. This article describes the development implementation and evaluation of simulation-based workshop to train hospital pharmacists on medicines reconciliation in Kuwait.

Implementing the medicines reconciliation tool in practice: challenges and opportunities for pharmacists in Kuwait.

Background: Using the medicines reconciliation tool which involves preparing an updated list of patient's medications at each transition of care can significantly enhance patient safety. The pharmacist has been leading this process in western healthcare systems. Little is known about pharmacists' role in medicines reconciliation in Middle Eastern Countries.

Situational awareness within objective structured clinical examination stations in undergraduate medical training - a literature search.

Background: Medical students may not be able to identify the essential elements of situational awareness (SA) necessary for clinical reasoning. Recent studies suggest that students have little insight into cognitive processing and SA in clinical scenarios. Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) could be used to assess certain elements of situational awareness.

Using video-reflexive ethnography to capture the complexity of leadership enactment in the healthcare workplace.

Current theoretical thinking asserts that leadership should be distributed across many levels of healthcare organisations to improve the patient experience and staff morale. However, much healthcare leadership education focusses on the training and competence of individuals and little attention is paid to the interprofessional workplace and how its inherent complexities might contribute to the emergence of leadership. Underpinned by complexity theory, this research aimed to explore how interprofessional healthcare teams enact leadership at a micro-level through influential acts of organising.

Exploring situational awareness in emergency medicine: developing a shared mental model to enhance training and assessment.

Non-technical skills (NTS) are gaining increasing prominence within the field of emergency medicine. Situational awareness (SA), one key component of NTS, is a key skill for emergency physicians (EPs) during initial training and throughout their career. Furthermore, the majority of frameworks used to evaluate clinical performance incorporate SA as one key component.

Leadership and followership in the healthcare workplace: exploring medical trainees' experiences through narrative inquiry.

Objectives: To explore medical trainees' experiences of leadership and followership in the interprofessional healthcare workplace.

Design: A qualitative approach using narrative interviewing techniques in 11 group and 19 individual interviews with UK medical trainees.

Setting: Multisite study across four UK health boards.

Dimensions, discourses and differences: trainees conceptualising health care leadership and followership.

Context: As doctors in all specialties are expected to undertake leadership within health care organisations, leadership development has become an inherent part of medical education. Whereas the leadership literature within medical education remains mostly focused on individual, hierarchical leadership, contemporary theory posits leadership as a group process, which should be distributed across all levels of health care organisation. This gap between theory and practice indicates that there is a need to understand what leadership and followership mean to medical trainees working in today's interprofessional health care workplace.

Introducing simulation-based education to healthcare professionals: exploring the challenge of integrating theory into educational practice.

Background: Introducing simulation-based education to the curricular programme of healthcare professionals can be challenging. This study explored the early experiences of healthcare professionals in the use of simulation. This was in the context of the Kuwait-Scotland transformational health innovation network programme.

A national approach for the use of simulation to educate and train the NHS workforce: the First National Clinical Skills Strategy.

Introduction: There have been a number of drivers for the use of simulation in healthcare education for the NHS workforce. The development of an accessible and efficient national approach to its implementation has been challenging.

Methods: An action research approach was used to develop a national strategy using several data inputs.

Pharmacy support in developing prescribing skills.

Background: Prescribing medicines is one of the most common interventions in health care, so even a small percentage of prescribing errors can affect many patients. Many of these errors are prevented by the intervention of pharmacists. Research has identified gaps in medical education and training that contribute to these errors.

Innovative teaching in situational awareness.

Background: In the UK the publication of the Health Select Committee Report highlighted the need to incorporate human factors training in health care education. In response there has been a rise in health care professional training in human factors, focusing on non-technical skills, such as teamwork, leadership and situational awareness.

Context: Using simulation and contextualised learning, we have developed a non-technical skills programme for undergraduate medical students that introduces situational awareness training in the first year.

Developing clinical skills bundles.

Background: This article describes an innovative method of learning clinical skills. A care bundle is defined as a small set of evidence-based interventions that, when implemented together, results in significantly better patient outcomes than when implemented individually. Care bundles improve the consistency of standards of care delivered, and hence reduce harm.

Constructing and evaluating a validity argument for the final-year ward simulation exercise.

The authors report final-year ward simulation data from the University of Dundee Medical School. Faculty who designed this assessment intend for the final score to represent an individual senior medical student's level of clinical performance. The results are included in each student's portfolio as one source of evidence of the student's capability as a practitioner, professional, and scholar.

Exploring stakeholders' views of medical education research priorities: a national survey.

Context: Setting research priorities is important when exploring complex issues with limited resources. Only two countries (Canada and New Zealand) have previously conducted priority-setting exercises for medical education research (MER). This study aimed to identify the views of multiple stakeholders on MER priorities in Scotland.

Performance of technology-driven simulators for medical students--a systematic review.

Background: Simulation-based education has evolved as a key training tool in high-risk industries such as aviation and the military. In parallel with these industries, the benefits of incorporating specialty-oriented simulation training within medical schools are vast. Adoption of simulators into medical school education programs has shown great promise and has the potential to revolutionize modern undergraduate education.

Ensuring standards for the extended role of optometry.

Background: In optometry, as in other health professions, such as pharmacy and nursing, there has been an expansion in the role of the optometrist in primary eye care, taking on aspects of care such as prescribing, which was traditionally undertaken by general practitioners. In optometry, this extended role involves monitoring eye conditions that do not require treatment or monitoring in secondary care, roles that were traditionally referred on. However, any extended role requires educational support.

Patient safety and communication: a new assessment for doctors trained in countries where language differs from that of the host country: results of a pilot using a domain-based assessment.

Objective: Global migration of healthcare workers places responsibility on employers to comply with legal employment rights whilst ensuring patient safety remains the central goal. We describe the pilot of a communication assessment designed for doctors who trained and communicated with patients and colleagues in a different language from that of the host country. It is unique in assessing clinical communication without assessing knowledge.

Making sense of feedback experiences: a multi-school study of medical students' narratives.

Context: Until recently, the perspective of students in the feedback process has been ignored, with strategies for improvement focusing on the tutor and feedback delivery. We employed an original narrative interviewing approach to explore how medical students make sense of their experiences of feedback.

Methods: A qualitative design was adopted employing three individual and 10 group interviews to elicit narratives of feedback experiences from 53 medical students at three 5-year undergraduate programmes in the UK during 2011.