Simulation Today Autumn 2021

FEATURE
Furthermore, to find any articles that could have been missed by
these search terms the term “emergency ADJ1 care” was searched.
This means that any words that had emergency and care one word
apart would be included in the search (NICE 2020). The search was
further augmented by the terms EMERGENCY HEALTH SERVICE”/ OR
*”HOSPITAL EMERGENCY SERVICE.
In some databases there were headings that were relevant, these
include
* Emergency Nursing
* Emergency patient
2. Do you work in the ED?
3. How frequently do you participant in simulation?
4. How useful do you find simulation to improve your practice (1-5)?
5. What factors enable you to attend simulation teaching while at
work?
6. What factors inhibit simulation you to attend simulation teaching
while at work?
7. Do you enjoy attending simulation teaching?
8. What are the last three digits of your telephone number?
9. What is your age?
Recruitment
The term “SIMULATION TRAINING” was explored. Polit and Beck (2017)
suggests improving the search by the truncation symbol “*(asterisk)”,
this expands the root word, (in this case simulat* was used) to form all
other versions of the word. The results of the database searches have
been summarised in table 1.
Table 1: Database Results
Database Emergency Dept Simulation Combined
EMBase 107,528 25,521 635
EMCare 444,427 101,484 1,572
CINAHL 191,366 16,983 980
PyscINFO 37,016 54,758 267
Medline 270,340 99,836 839
Due to large number of articles any article not written in English or over
10 years-old was excluded. A secondary search of relevant paper was
performed, to strengthen the search.
A total of 74 articles were selected for further analysis. It appears there
is a paucity in the literature around the factors that both enable and
inhibit all healthcare professionals from undertaking simulation at work,
as none of the articles discuss these factors. The field of healthcare
that has the most literature written about SBLE is medicine. Other allied
healthcare professionals’ fields such as nursing, paramedics, have
limited literature. Of the 74 article selected only three seemed to be very
relevant to this topic. But all failed to mention any factors that motivate
or inhibit SBLE for emergency nurses.
The literature that is published tends to focus on the pre-registered
nurse education or emergency medicine or the effect the simulation
had on individuals. There is very little written on factors which inhibit
nurses from undertaking simulation in the ED or generally. Due to the
lack of literature the author felt that to properly assess the barriers that
inhibit nurses from accessing simulation training while working in the ED
that emergency nurses needed to be asked directly. Therefore, a short
questionnaire was created.
Questionnaire
The survey had nine questions and was entitles ‘simulation for nurses
in the ED’ so people knew it was for nursing staff. The questions asked
were
1. Are you a nurse?
One of the problems of using questionnaires as a methodology for
data collection is, it has a poor response rate (Holloway & Galvin 2017).
All members of nursing staff for one ED were emailed once, then to
augment this one message was placed on emergency care association
(ECA) Facebook and Twitter accounts. The ECA is the Royal College of
Nursing’s forum for emergency care (RCN 2020). Furthermore, three
other matrons or heads of nursing were emailed once to recruit their
staff. After 3 months the survey was closed. All but one participant
worked in an ED, this individual had only left a few weeks before and still
worked as a casual member of staff.
To improve the reliability of this questionnaire, question 8 was asked to
prevent individuals from repeatedly answering.
Inclusion criteria
Respondent’s needed to be working in the ED as a member of nursing
staff, this could be part time or full time. Casual members of staff would
be considered provided they worked regularly in an ED.
Exclusion criteria
The exclusion criteria were anyone who did not work as a member of
nursing staff in an ED.
Bias
To prevent bias from nurses, both factors that enabled and inhibited
simulation were requested. Bias can be created by individuals is known
as the Hawthorne effect which is a change in response or behaviour of
subjects when included in study (Garg 2016), by asking nurses about
both sides it may prevent them from being either overly positive or
negative.
Results
The questionnaire gained 50 responses. From the respondents
86% were registered nurses and 14% were unregistered. Cultural
backgrounds were not assessed but age was, the breakdown of the
age can be seen in table 2.
The age was asked as the author wanted to explore whether the age
of participants was related to simulation enjoyment. As anecdotally
the author has seen several older nurses stating that they don’t like
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