So, our first conference report on EDeducate.
On June 11th Harmony, Liz, Ashleigh, Kirsten and I descended on Birmingham for the Emergency Medicine Educators Conference organised by Scott Carrington. It was an excellent programme:
so I'll try to summarise some of the educational pearls I, as a non-educationalist ED person, brought from it.
Our own Kirsten Walthall started with an emotional discussion of being the debriefer for a large team traumatised by a paediatric cardiac arrest. Take home points: the team leader is probably not the right person to lead a debrief, as they need to offload all the decisions they just made; the person debriefing after a difficult event internalises all the emotion of the team to facilitate them, and that debriefer will need looking after later;
Scott took us back to the 80s with the Top 20 teaching tips, which are:
1. Post-it pearls
2. Lavatory learning
3. Hot debriefs
4. FOAM prescriptions
5. Handover hunt
6. Teaching scripts
7. Paramedic postbox
8. Random patient generator
9. Question of the week
10. What if?
11. Deadliest diagnosis
12. Teach by presentation, not system
13. 3 things you learnt today
14. SNAPPS
15. One minute preceptor
16. SPIT differentials
17. Make your simulation distracting
18. Ninja reflection
19. Sixty second summaries
20. One patient, one teaching point
If you aren't familiar with all these (I wasn't), there's a helpful summary.
Chris Walsh from the RCEM education team gave an update on what's available on RCEM Learning, most of it FOAMEd, and all linked to the RCEM curriculum.
Pandora and the team from #EM3 at Leicester took us through their experience of developing an ED education fellow role – and why we all need one. Leicester has gone from being a department with a very negative GMC report on training, to having a session on every shift for staff education, portfolio clinics for junior doctors, and in situ sim sessions for the whole multidisciplinary team (impressive). The fellows themselves also seem to get a lot out of the job (space and autonomy) and the department has committed middle grades to help with rota gaps.
Moya Flaherty took us through the process of developing a whole department education programme at Northampton, breaking the silos so the whole team train together. She also advocated peer to peer teaching, finding your passion (in her case ECGs), and working in small time slots.
Then Anu Mitra, whose talk was putatively about Schwartz Rounds. What I hadn't realised was that Anu was the trauma team lead for the hospital local to Grenfell Tower that night, and he gave a powerful message about self-care for the team.
The last plenary speaker was Emma Plunkett, an anaesthetist from Birmingham, on their learning from excellence programme. This was a bit of an eye-opener for me; we have so many systems for learning from error, but very few that reinforce stuff we do really well. Given that a system will move towards the processes it studies, maybe we should study the good a bit more......
And finally, EDUWARS. Tim Slade played rock, paper, scissors live on stage to demonstrate the function of forearm nerves, Immad Qureshi made the trauma primary survey into jigsaws and Saad Jawaid demonstrated the auditory feedback of decompressing a tension pneumothorax with a toy dinosaur and a fruit shoot bottle........in the end it was won by Ash, with two very personal stories of exsanguinating haemorrhage and the management of traumatic cardiac arrest.
For more info about the day, #theemec has all the live tweets, including real-time infographics from @whistlingdixie4. There were some excellent workshops during the day as well, reports to follow.
RCN curriculum GNP 1.3.2, GNP 1.3.3