Virtual telesimulation lessons can be effective alternatives when in-person teaching is not possible, medical researchers including Ms Kirsty Freeman, the then-lead for the Clinical Performance Centre at Duke-NUS, found.
Their findings, published in The Asia Pacific Scholar, showed that if used correctly, telesimulation lessons can sharpen non-tactile aspects of clinical care such as history-taking, executing treatment algorithms and team communication.
With stringent controls on movement and gatherings still in place and high-risk clinical areas like the emergency room (ER) still off limits to students, a team from Duke-NUS along with colleagues from across the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre transformed a four-week emergency medicine clerkship into a virtual experience for 58 Duke-NUS medical students.
And even with the time and resource crunch, Freeman’s team did not spare any attention to detail.
“An ER is a noisy place,” she noted.
So, her team honed students’ psychological readiness by layering on medical equipment noises for fidelity — this ensured that students were immersed in as life-like an environment as possible, and that they could transition more smoothly into real-world practice.
THE SIMULATION EXPERIENCE CREATED BY KIRSTY FREEMAN AND HER COLLEAGUES ENSURED STUDENTS HAD AS LIFE-LIKE AN EXPERIENCE OF THE BUSY AND NOISY ENVIRONMENT OF AN EMERGENCY ROOM AS POSSIBL
More than 97 per cent of students who provided feedback agreed that participating in the simulations was interesting and useful. Thirty-eight felt that telesimulation provided a good grounding before beginning their real-life clinical work.
However, the student respondents indicated that the limitations of telesimulation included an inability to examine patients, perform procedures and understand non-verbal cues of team members and patients.
Freeman and her research team found, too, that designing the telesimulation according to defined objectives and scheduling it after theory teaching contributed to a successfully executed lesson. Having faculty skilled in debriefing techniques that enable the learner to critically reflect on the telesimulation lesson was also advantageous.
The team, as such, recommended that educators who wish to implement a telesimulation programme should pay particular attention to the learning objectives and debriefing methods.