Introduction
High-quality clinical disaster medicine requires medical teams working together in austere, chaotic environments. Many providers lack adequate training, and many educators fail to adequately assess disaster performance during training.
Objective
To create a competency-based, 5-hour emergency preparedness training (EPT) curriculum with low-fidelity training tools and easy-to-reproduce skill assessments. We hypothesized that our unique tools and assessments would help demonstrate improved trainee knowledge, confidence, and disaster medicine skills.
Methods
Diverse groups of medical university students, healthcare professionals, and community members were enrolled between 2011 and 2014. The course consisted of an online questionnaire, didactic lectures, small-group exercises and 2 live, multipatient mass casualty incident (MCI) scenarios. When not participating as responders during an MCI, trainees served as patients, significantly increasing the “chaos” of the scenario. They also filled out team performance observations cards, greatly simplifying performance data collection.
Results
Seven hundred and eight participants completed training between November 2011 and August 2014, including 49.9% physicians, 31.9% medical students, 7.2% nurses, and 11% various other healthcare professions. All participants completed the pretest and 71.9% completed the post-test, with average correct answers increasing from 39% to 60%. After didactics, trainees met 73% and 96% of performance objectives for the 2 small group exercises and 68.5% and 61.1% of performance objectives for the 2 MCI scenarios. Average trainee self-assessment of both overall knowledge and confidence with clinical disasters improved from 33/100 to 74/100 (overall knowledge) and 33/100 to 77/100 (overall confidence). The course assessment was completed by 34.3% of participants, 91.5% of whom highly recommended the course.
Conclusion
Our EPT course demonstrated improved trainee knowledge, confidence, and disaster medicine skills with the help of trainees acting as responders, patients, and observers. This unique EPT curriculum may help educators with limited resources implement performance-based medical team training effectively and efficiently.