Board 249 - Program Innovations Abstract Simulation Olympics as a Platform to Assess Assimilation of Learned Teamwork Dynamics (Submission #360)

Introduction/Background It has been found that interprofessional team training can positively impact patient safety and teamwork knowledge acquisition in healthcare students who take part in such courses early in their careers.1 In addition, courses which provide interactive educational experiences seem to be most impactful.1 Our patient safety course consists of five days of interactive, experiential learning experiences with several lectures throughout the week to anchor learned concepts. This weeklong course concludes with an engaging, onstage competition called Sim Olympics ™ which is used as a platform to promote student engagement, as well as to highlight student teams that have demonstrated excellence during the course. In 2008 Okuda et al2 introduced Sim Wars to the medical simulation community. Sim Wars is an onstage competition for assessing teamwork, communication and patient care.2 Several years ago we adopted this competition as a way to engage students attending a simulation-based patient safety course and named it Sim Olympics™. Rather than volunteering to compete, as done in Sim Wars, our student teams were selected based on their performance during a simulation encounter in the course which was scored with a crisis resource management (CRM) tool developed by our team of patient safety experts. We sought to answer the question of whether Sim Olympics™ could serve as a way to evaluate mastery of teamwork concepts by students in the audience. Other researchers have successfully used the review and scoring of video vignettes to assess acquisition of patient safety competencies such as teamwork, collaboration, leadership and problem solving.2 Thus, we hypothesized that Sim Olympics™ would be similarly successful. Methods Two hundred twenty learners from the school of medicine and school of nursing participated in the first simulation-based interprofessional patient safety course held at the University of Miami. The two highest scoring teams were selected during a simulation encounter using our CRM tool as a scoring instrument. Each team consisted of four medical students and two nursing students. They were given a case that was more challenging than cases earlier in the week. Immediately following each team’s performance, the audience members were asked to evaluate each team using the same CRM tool that was used to select the teams. Finally, the audience was asked to select the winner based either on the numerical scores they gave the team or based on their overall impression of team performance. One hundred ninety students evaluated team one’s encounter and 170 students evaluated team two’s encounter (outliers more than two standard deviations from the mean were discarded). Scores submitted by the audience members were analyzed using a Student’s t-test comparing the differences in the mean scores of each team, showing a statistically significant difference (p<.001). Results: Conclusion Our students were able to assimilate their learning of teamwork dynamics by demonstrating an ability as a group to discern subtle differences in great teamwork and good teamwork. An onstage competition can be used successfully as a platform to assess assimilated learning. References 1. Robertson B, Kaplan B, Atallah H, Higgins M, Lewitt MJ, Ander DS: The use of simulation and a modified TeamSTEPPS curriculum for medical and nursing student team training. Simulation in Healthcare 2010; 5: 332-337. 2. Okuda Y, Godwin SA, Westenbarger R, Shen B: “Sim Wars”: A new edge to academic residency competitions. SAEM Annual Meeting Abstracts. Academic Emergency Medicine 2009; 16: S275. 3. Dong C, Clapper TC, Szyld D: A qualitative descriptive study of Sim Wars as a meaningful instructional tool. International Journal of Medical Education 2013; 20: 139-145. Disclosures None.