Simulation & Interprofessional Learning in the Wilderness

Background: A pre-hospital emergency medicine wilderness program was developed to build interprofessional collaborative and practice skills amongst medical and paramedic students.

Summary of work: The structured residential 2-day program, held in remote southern Tasmania, comprised (i) a pre-briefing session, (ii) 12 simulated emergency scenarios with facilitator, (iii) a simulated multi casualty incident (MCI) involving drowning, fire and motor vehicle injury and (iv) debriefing. Equipped with a backpack containing basic first aid supplies, small mixed groups of students hiked between different scenarios that required assessment of the situation, application of wilderness medicine principles, immediate management and referral and handover to a retrieval team. The MCI, held in the evening, enabled new teams to form and apply learning from the earlier scenarios. The program was evaluated using pre and post-event surveys which included RIPLs and Working in Health Care Teams questionnaires and completion of post event reflections.

Summary of results: There was a significant improvement in RIPLS teamwork and collaboration score after the event (t (26) = 2.41, p = .023). Post event reflective comments showed a change in focus from the abstract to applied, and from team work/ collaboration actions to outcomes.

Discussion: Conducting scenarios in the wilderness focused students on harnessing available team resources and skills to analyse and solve clinical problems to achieve patient outcomes.

Conclusions: The low-resource wilderness environment effectively focused student interprofessional learning on practice . Take-home message: IPL in a wilderness setting challenges students to apply clinical learning rather than be distracted by SimCentre technologies.