There are significant practical and ethical problems in investigating team-related issues like
team-building during CPR in real cases: 1) cardiac arrests are emergencies and not planned events; 2) as team-building occurs during the early phase of a cardiac arrest, trained observers had to be at the scene Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical from the very onset of the arrest, which under most circumstances is impractical to achieve; and 3) for ethical reasons such observers had to intervene immediately in case of obvious deficits in CPR which would invalidate the use of their observational data for the investigation of the teams’ performance. Medical simulation allows Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the investigation of issues that for a variety of medical, practical, and ethical reasons are difficult, if not impossible to investigate in real patients. As far as CPR is concerned, simulation allows planned and repetitive investigations with perfectly identical conditions for all participants. Moreover, simulation allows recording of objective data from both “patients” and physicians right from the start of a simulated cardiac arrest and, therefore, appears
to be perfectly suited to investigate the process of team-building during CPR. The aim of the present study was to explore and quantify the effects of the process of ad-hoc team-building Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical on the adherence to algorithm in CPR. We studied two types of physicians that both play an important role as first responders during CPR: general practitioners and hospital physicians. To unmask team-building we compared the performance of preformed teams, i.e. teams that Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical had undergone their process
of team-building prior to the onset of a cardiac Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical arrest with that of teams that had to form ad-hoc during the cardiac arrest. Methods Participants The study took place between 2002 and 2005 during consecutive workshops at the simulation centre of the University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland. The workshops were marketed as “unique learning experience of selleckchem relevant medical emergencies in a patient simulator” and physicians could take part on a voluntary basis. No formal previous training was required to participate and, during the workshop, no training or teaching was provided prior to the simulation. Thus, Resveratrol the participants’ performance reflected their current knowledge and skills. Participants were general practitioners involved in emergency duties or hospital physicians of different specialities (internal medicine, cardiology, intensive care) and status (staff physicians, residents, juniors). The study was approved by the local ethical committee and written informed consent was obtained from all participants. Simulator A high-fidelity patient simulator (Human Patient Simulator, METI®, Sarasota, FL, USA) was used.