Retention and transferability of team resource management skills in anaesthetic emergencies: the long-term impact of a high-fidelity simulation-based course

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVEIn 2005, we developed and implemented the Emergency Anaesthetic Simulated Experience course at the Cheshire and Merseyside Simulation Centre.Emergency Anaesthetic Simulated Experience aims to teach clinical and team resource management skills to junior trainees in anaesthesia. Here we present ‘proof-of-concept’ in terms of long-term retention and transferability of acquired skills into subsequent clinical practice. METHODSAn electronic questionnaire sent to 73 trainees, 9–20 months after the course, invited open-ended responses, addressing four areas; namely, real-life encounters with the same scenario as on the course, approach to real-life anaesthetic emergencies in general, approach to real-life routine anaesthesia and need to attend similar courses in the future, with their underlying reasons. RESULTSQualitative analysis of the descriptive responses showed that the lessons learnt in the context of simulated emergencies were applied by candidates themselves to real-life emergencies in general and to routine practice. CONCLUSIONTeam resource management skills learnt in a single educational intervention, based on simulated anaesthetic emergencies, are retained over the long term, translated into clinical practice and are transferable across the breadth of clinical activities.