ep. 11 – Designing Better Sim Cases

by (updated on )

Kyla Caners (@drcaners) from emsimcases.com was our guest on this Simulcast episode on scenario design. She and Jesse shared tips on knowing what you’re trying to achieve, planning the scenario, using templates, finding ‘supporting objects and ‘road testing’ and peer review for sim cases.

Design requires a lot of attention to detail and really sets up the educational event for success or otherwise.  There was a strong theme to keep it simple and not overburden participants with difficult diagnostic cases if simulator cues are relatively poor, which might add to cognitive load without effective educational effect. In the episode we mentioned the yet to be published work by Chris Hicks, Andrew Petrosoniak and the St Mike’s Toronto team. To inform their stress inoculation training intervention study, a delphi study was conducted and ranked diagnostic ambiguity as one of the most significant stressors faced by emergency healthcare providers.

We also profiled Kyla’s EM simcases blog – a #FOAMed resource with pre-written cases, templates and more. Check out this resource and Kyla also encouraged listeners to send simulation scenario cases for peer review if interested. 

Vic 

4 thoughts on “ep. 11 – Designing Better Sim Cases”

  • Tanya Dean

    Hi Vic and Jesse and Kyla
    I realise I am commenting many months after this podcast was published but I really enjoyed this episode and have listened back to it a few times now and taken something different away from each listen.

    I am an emergency physician and I was having a discussion with one of my colleagues who is a nursing educator. It was along the lines of Jesse’s point regarding an educator from one profession designing and developing simulations for a interprofessional/multidisciplinary simulation and not focusing on the needs of the learners from other backgrounds. Medical staff are often guilty of this, not considering the learning needs of nursing staff or even medical staff from a different specialty and using these participants as a prop to facilitate running the scenario for the medical staff rather than regarding them as a group of learners.
    I this not only misses the opportunity for all participants to get the most from the session but risks alienating some of your participants/learners.
    I was wondering if any of you had come across any articles on this topic?

    Thanks

    • Jesse Spurr Post author

      Hi Tanya,
      Thanks for reflecting on one of my favourite episodes. I think we are doomed to our blind spots, but there are some great ways to deconstruct interprofessional team functions. I’m not familiar with any literature explicitly addressing the issue of cross discipline design and relationship to functional alignment and task realism. One paper that has been a game changer for me in thinking about deconstructing a multiprofessional and interdisciplinary activity is the CHAT paper by Walter Eppich and Adam Cheng https://www.nursingsimulation.org/article/S1876-1399(15)00051-1/pdf?code=ecsn-site Well worth a read.
      Cheers for the feedback and prompted revisit of this episode.
      Jesse

      • Tanya Dean

        Thanks Jesse, for your response and the article suggestion.
        Always interested in anything from Walter Eppich.
        Tanya

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