What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to your chosen theme?

Multi-disciplinary high-fidelity simulation is well established in our acute hospital trust. We regularly use this modality to teach our own clinical teams as part of improvement work in sepsis, NEWS2, and in response to other learning needs identified by internal critical incident reviews and risk analyses. Evidence demonstrates that patient care is most effectively enhanced when teams train together; our recent work has focused on cutting across professional boundaries to invite individuals from multiple disciplines to undertake joint training in our state-of-the art Simulation Space and in active clinical areas as part of in-situ simulation exercises. The costs of resourcing and delivering simulation creates a barrier to smaller community teams benefiting from the opportunities for quality improvement it represents. Our challenge is to break down these barriers by transporting our equipment and expertise in simulation across the boundaries between Secondary and Primary Care.

What does your project aim to achieve?

The aim of this project is to enable Primary Care teams to benefit from our resources and expertise in the delivery of simulation training, improving their confidence and skills when managing critically ill patients, and building a community of practice which seeks to use simulation to identify future targets for improvement work. Individual community teams are not resourced to deliver in-house simulation, yet we know that hospital teams benefit from training via this modality. Our project is intended to connect their training needs with our capability to meet them, maximising the potential for benefit from our hospital’s significant investment in simulation equipment and faculty of the past few years. In order to measure the success of our project, we will undertake cycles of evaluation and refinement of our simulation training to maximise its potential for impact on the care teams deliver to patients.

How will the project be delivered?

We aim to purchase a portable medical simulator to allow our Simulation Nurse to work with colleagues in local GP practices, to identify and close performance gaps in specific clinical, technical, and team-working skills. In collaboration with the community team, they will design, deliver and refine a simulation training package using the new simulation equipment. The planning phase will involve the identification of SMART learning outcomes and the writing of simulations to deliver these. During the implementation phase, we will collect and analyse evaluation data to ensure we are meeting these outcomes, informing further development. Once honed, the training will be expanded to more GP surgeries, with ongoing cycles of evaluation to measure its impact. At all stages we aim to identify and train enthusiastic members of the community team in the skills necessary to design and implement their own simulation programmes, ensuring the project remains sustainable.

What and how is your project going to share learning throughout?

We plan to use multiple cycles of evaluation to refine our simulation offering to partner teams in Primary Care, sharing the results of these via an online dashboard made available to the Q-Network, and more widely via the Simulation Space at North Bristol NHS Trust website and social media accounts. At the end of the project, we undertake to present our work for publication and/or presentation for dissemination to the wider Q-community.