Patient Safety / Simulation and Ergonomics

This week I wanted to carry on with the simulation theme and consider the diseases and conditions we often simulate.  If we start to describe our simulation scenario our participants will often second guess our scenarios - often correctly, just think of the common introductions  The patient has just been given antibiotics [ anaphylaxis ]  The patient has just returned from theatres [ massive haemorrhage ]…… and so the list continues.  Of course the interesting thing to realise is that in our hospitals countless patients have antibiotics each day without anaphylaxis and the majority of patients return from theatres and make uneventful recoveries. In fact the recent 6th National Audit Project of the Royal College of Anaesthetists looking at perioperative anaphylaxis  ( NAP 6 )  found out of three million patients there was a 1:10,000 occurrence of anaphylaxis compared to a probable 1:1 occurrence in simulation population following administration of antibiotics.  

Thanks again to all those people who have commented and helped my blogs to evolve. The conversations around human bias, its predictability and also a tangent looking at bias in AI were fascinating. This week I want to move back to a simulation focus - really so I can get to the stage of linking the themes together. I am going to focus on the benefits and challenges of working with Simulated Persons and what that can bring to simulation based learning events. If you work in clinical practice you are constantly gathering information from around you and this includes those subtle assessments of our patients. If you are walking over to a patient you are are looking at how they are laying in bed, how they move and breathing pattern.We do a lot of this information gathering sub consciously often only aware of it in more acute cases. The trouble is that the majority of our manikins do not do these things so we have some one standing beside them to tell us these things if they ask. Further

So the second blog, thanks to those of you who read the first and an in particularly to the person who noted if they printed it off it stopped a table wobbling ...... I have thought a bit about what to write as my second blog - not because I'm stuck for ideas but exactly the opposite there are loads of things that I am really keen to blog about - I could have done a follow up to the first blog and expanded that but I wanted to start some where else with the view to start to merge and see how all the blogs start to weave together. So in this blog I want to focus on error and in particularly those subconscious - human errors. Personally I feel in health care we are fairly immature in our response and understanding of error. All to often the automatic reaction is why did they do that unfortunately even today all to often that is nearly as quickly followed by the offer of retraining to teach the person how to do it properly. Errors are still seen as something careless that other