Pocket Book for Simulation Debriefing in Healthcare

This book is a concise manual on debriefing techniques in a clinical educational context. It presents the most popular debriefing techniques and, hence, can be used as a reference manual by educators to help them achieve their intended debriefing objectives. The overarching objective of debriefing is to promote reflection and improve patient safety awareness at an individual and a team level. This book provides clear explanations of what constitutes a valuable and effective debriefing, and presents the various approaches that can be used and how debriefing differs from feedback. It includes key recommendations on aspects that directly or indirectly impact debriefing with different populations of learners such as students or qualified healthcare professionals of various levels of seniority. This book can also be used as a survival guide for both simulation educators and clinicians during debriefings. It includes several useful sections explaining the different phases of a debriefing session, which help learners develop and consolidate their knowledge, and identify potential knowledge or performance gaps and near misses. The underlying philosophy of this book is to also promote profound respect for the trainee by using a non-offensive debriefing approach. Debriefing facilitators will appreciate the several key sentences that will help them lead and engage their learners in the various phases of expressing their emotions and analyzing their experience and actions.

After a MSc in neurosciences, Prof. Denis Oriot obtained his M.D. and board certification in paediatrics and anaesthesiology. He spent 2 years in Paris, specializing in paediatric intensive care. Then he flew over to Canada to spend a 2-year fellowship in Montreal Children’s Hospital (McGill University) in 1989-1990, practicing clinical care (Paediatric intensive care), research, and teaching. That was his first discovery of simulation and debriefing. Back in France, he got nominated as Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Poitiers (France). Besides clinical care, Denis studied moral philosophy (Sorbonne, Paris) and obtained a Ph.D. in bioethics (University René Descartes, Paris). He has a large clinical experience with more than 20 years of practice in Paediatric Intensive Care and Paediatric Emergency Medicine. As one of the French pioneers in simulation, he developed training programmes in the early 1990’s. Denis is at the head of a French nationwide simulation-based education programme through a university course on paediatric emergency procedures. He has taught simulation-based education in several overseas facilities during the last two decades. He is currently the scientific referee of the Simulation Centre in Poitiers, France. Denis also has been attending as a trainee various simulation education courses in the US about simulation and debriefing during the last 10 years. Denis has also developed several research projects in simulation about performance and stress, multi-professional teamwork and performance, disclosure of bad news, mastery trainings on specific paediatric and adult emergency procedures, and different types of debriefing approaches. He has a particular interest in assessment of procedures and global evaluation of emergency teamwork performance.

Prof. Guillaume Alinier started his academic career in 2000 at the University of Hertfordshire’s (UH) School of Electronic, Communication, and Electrical Engineering as a researcher on a British Heart Foundation funded project to develop patient simulation technology for use in healthcare education. Very rapidly Guillaume started demonstrating fellow academics that, when embedded in clinical scenarios followed by a supportive debriefing period, mannequins and computer controlled patient simulators could be used in a different manner with learners to observe and understand their critical thinking, decision making, and their application of clinical skills in a more autonomous manner than previously dared by his colleagues with students. With this approach Guillaume embarked in multiple simulation-based educational activities across a range of disciplines with undergraduate students as well as in collaboration with local NHS Trusts for the training of junior doctors and healthcare professionals, and also started to contribute to the various nascent healthcare simulation-education gatherings and conferences around Europe and in the US. These activities, alongside the training that Guillaume started to provide through courses to educators from other institutions, various journal editorial responsibilities, and the roles he occupied within the wider simulation community around the world, granted Guillaume the award of a National Teaching Fellowship in 2006, a Senior Fellowship in 2009 from the Higher Education Academy (UK), a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Northumbria (UK) since 2009, and his full tenure professorship in 2011. Whilst still affiliated to UH, he is now based in Qatar working as Director of Research for Hamad Medical Corporation Ambulance Service (HMCAS). In this role he has actively led and contributed to a large number of innovative projects on a broad range of domains across several HMC departments, generally still related to simulation and human factors.