Symposium 1 – Improving Quality and Safety in Health-care through Modernized Training Approach

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated the stresses that frontline healthcare workers encounter on the job. One of those stresses can feeling psychologically unsafe in our work teams. To strengthen and sustain team psychological safety we designed and implemented a daily on-shift teamwork process called “Circle Up” in several hospitals and health systems. 
Circle up:
• Creates regular times and places for team problem-solving and connection, promotes better communication and improves the psychological well-being of care teams. Through strategic adaptation of existing huddles and end-of-day debriefings Circle Up systematically allows teams to unite, “warm up” and “cool down.” 
• Improves on-shift work processes, resilience, and peer connection. It also supports colleagues to “doff” their work identity and concerns at the end of the day such that home life is more refreshing and separate. Participants report greater interprofessional peer connectedness and less psychological distress. They feel encouraged to speak up more throughout the day and with colleagues they would not normally approach. 
• Offers a proactive, rather than reactive, process of on-shift learning, process improvement, and peer support. Because of the silos created by most healthcare training, our healthcare teams are made up of profession-based subteams with their own “microclimates.” Circle up provides ways to connect these subteams and dissolve professional faultlines.

Imagine building a car and hoping that it will be safe when it is put on the road. Most people would agree this is a risky approach to building and testing cars. Instead cars are crash tested to understand its performance under stress.
 
The healthcare system is no different. Predicting how this system will behave, react and respond under stress is nearly impossible. Carefully designed simulations, essentially recreated clinical events, allow designers, administrators and clinicians to observe and test new ideas. We call this translational simulation, with the focus to directly improve patient care and healthcare systems. This promising technique allows for an improved understanding of “work-as-done” and how it relates to “work-as-imagined”. Translational simulation can be used for a spectrum of situations from the designing of new clinical spaces to the building of new systems to the testing of existing processes. In this session, we will discuss the how translational simulation will be an essential part of the future of healthcare focusing on specific use cases, their benefits and the return on investment.

E-Learning and Workplace Based Assessment are gaining their recognitions in specialist training in Hong Kong. Innovative Learning Centre for Medicine of the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine has taken the initiatives to collaborate with Colleges in the development of Train-the-Trainer for Workplace Based Assessments (WBA) and provides a forum for development. The Hong Kong Academy of Medicine with the support of government has recently launched the eHKAM, an electronic e-Learning Platform for Fellows of Colleges in Hong Kong, and in parallel, a Learning OnLine (LOL) Course has been developed and are in the fourth course currently. These initiatives pace the exciting development for medical education in the new technology era.