Use of human patient simulation to teach emergency medicine trainees advanced airway skills.

Advanced airway management skills are essential for emergency physicians and are a required competency for trainees sitting for the Fellowship of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine. The technical psychomotor skills are best taught under supervision in the operating theatre or the emergency department, but the decision making and organisational skills needed to apply them safely and manage their complications are harder to teach. The use ofhuman patient simulators, which model human physiology and the effects of aging, illness and drugs, is now a common method of teaching crisis management to anaesthetic trainees. It is our view that this is an ideal environment to teach the integration of the basic technical skills of airway management, with the goal of trying to manage airway problems in the emergency department. This paper describes a one day advanced airway course we developed and ran, primarily for emergency medicine trainees. It included lectures and skill stations centred on a human patient simulator.