It has certainly been more of a marathon than a sprint for the Trust’s SPRinT simulation team, who have celebrated 10 years of providing their expert training to clinical teams.
SPRinT – which stands for Simulated interPRofessional Team Training – uses state of the art models and highly-immersive situations to prepare teams for a variety of clinical emergency scenarios.
To celebrate 10 years since the programme launched, the SPRinT team held a day of lectures, demonstrations and panel discussions for Trust staff and external partners at a venue in Kensington.
Addressing the guests, programme director Dr Margarita Burmester explained the evolution of SPRinT, starting with a simple doll to help people learn team working skills, to the modern SPRinT courses which include fully interactive mannequins and video evaluation of participants to maximise learning.
Dr Burmester said: “We work in an environment which is highly intense and involves fast decision making. Patient care is never done in isolation, it involves teams of people, so we wanted to improve team working skills to drive a culture of safety.
“There certainly have been advances in technology over the years, but the most effective way to ensure the programme would deliver the results we wanted was to spend time training our faculty, to raise the quality of the training being delivered.
“It has been a long process, with a lot of learning along the way, but today we are conducting research that we are publishing and presenting internationally, we have trained more than 1,500 participants to date, and people from other institutions are wanting to come on our courses.”
Dr Martin Stocker, a former SPRinT fellow who is now lead of the paediatric and neonatal intensive care unit at Lucerne Children’s Hospital in Switzerland, presented research to quantify the value of simulation training, which has shown that people who have undertaken at least one SPRinT course feel more confident and less anxious when facing a real emergency situation.
This value is keenly recognised by Trust chief executive Bob Bell, who attended the event. He told the audience: “When you are dealing with people’s safety – patient safety – simulation is a really important tool for teaching the correct processes.
“It gives me great comfort and pleasure to know that by using simulation training we are developing complete teams with the knowledge and capability to deal with unexpected events in critical care. I congratulate the SPRinT team on this successful endeavour.”
The day concluded with SPRinT director Dr Mary Lane looking ahead to the next 10 years and sharing the team’s vision for the future: “We are constantly looking to ways to improve and innovate.
“From improving our courses to enhance learning, to research into patient safety, to developing models to engage the entire multi-professional team, we are committed to developing the NHS workforce to provide safer high-quality care for all.”
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