Debriefing with good judgment: combining rigorous feedback with genuine inquiry.

Drawing on theory and empirical findings from a 35-year research program in the behavioral sciences on how to improve professional effectiveness through reflective practice, we develop a model of "debriefing with good judgment." The model specifies a rigorous reflection process that helps trainees surface and resolve pressing clinical and behavioral dilemmas raised by the simulation. Based on the authors' own experience using this approach in approximately 2000 debriefings, it was found that the "debriefing with good judgment" approach often sparks self-reflection and behavior change in trainees.

There's no such thing as "nonjudgmental" debriefing: a theory and method for debriefing with good judgment.

We report on our experience with an approach to debriefing that emphasizes disclosing instructors' judgments and eliciting trainees' assumptions about the situation and their reasons for acting as they did. To highlight the importance of instructors disclosing their judgment skillfully, we call the approach "debriefing with good judgment." The approach draws on theory and empirical findings from a 35-year research program in the behavioral sciences on how to improve professional effectiveness through "reflective practice.

A method for measuring the effectiveness of simulation-based team training for improving communication skills.

Team behavior and coordination, particularly communication or team information-sharing, are critical for optimizing team performance; research in medicine generally provides no accepted method for measurement of team information-sharing. In a controlled simulator setting, we developed a technique for placing clinical information (probes) with members of a team of trainees participating in a 1-day Anesthesia Crisis Resource Management course and later tested the teams for knowledge of the probes as an indicator of overall team information-sharing. Despite the low level of team information-sharing, we demonstrated construct validity of the probe methodology by the correlation of measured change in team information-sharing from beginning to end of training with self-rated change.