Socially-shared cognition and consensus in small groups

The effectiveness of improving healthcare teams' human factor skills using simulation-based training: a systematic review

Background

Simulation-based training used to train healthcare teams’ skills and improve clinical practice has evolved in recent decades. While it is evident that technical skills training is beneficial, the potential of human factor training has not been described to the same extent. Research on human factor training has been limited to marginal and acute care scenarios and often to validate instruments. This systematic review aimed to investigate the effectiveness of simulation-based training in improving in-hospital qualified healthcare teams’ human factor skills.

Method

A review protocol outlining the study was registered in PROSPERO. Using the PRISMA guidelines, the systematic search was conducted on September 28th, 2021, in eight major scientific databases. Three independent reviewers assessed title and abstract screening; full texts were evaluated by one reviewer. Content analysis was used to evaluate the evidence from the included studies.

Results

The search yielded 19,767 studies, of which 72 were included. The included studies were published between 2004 and 2021 and covered research from seven different in-hospital medical specialisms. Studies applied a wide range of assessment tools, which made it challenging to compare the effectiveness of human factor skills training across studies. The content analysis identified evidence for the effectiveness. Four recurring themes were identified: (1) Training human factor skills in qualified healthcare teams; (2) assessment of human factor skills; (3) combined teaching methods, and (4) retention and transfer of human factor skills. Unfortunately, the human factor skills assessments are variable in the literature, affecting the power of the result.

Conclusion

Simulation-based training is a successful learning tool to improve qualified healthcare teams’ human factor skills. Human factor skills are not innate and appear to be trainable similar to technical skills, based on the findings of this review. Moreover, research on retention and transfer is insufficient. Further, research on the retention and transfer of human factor skills from simulation-based training to clinical practice is essential to gain knowledge of the effect on patient safety.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s41077-022-00207-2.

Who do you trust? The digital destruction of shared situational awareness and the COVID-19 infodemic

Developments in centrally managed communications (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) and service (e.g. Uber, airbnb) platforms, search engines and data aggregation (e.g. Google) as well as data analytics and artificial intelligence, have created an era of digital disruption during the last decade. Individual user profiles are produced by platform providers to make money from tracking, predicting, exploiting and influencing their users' decision preferences and behavior, while product and service providers transform their business models by targeting potential customers with more accuracy. There have been many social and economic benefits to this digital disruption, but it has also largely contributed to the digital destruction of mental model alignment and shared situational awareness through the propagation of mis-information i.e. reinforcement of dissonant mental models by recommender algorithms, bots and trusted individual platform users (influencers). To mitigate this process of digital destruction, new methods and approaches to the centralized management of these platforms are needed to build on and encourage trust in the actors that use them (and by association trust in their mental models). The global 'infodemic' resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, highlights the current problem confronting the information system discipline and the urgency of finding workable solutions.

How shared reality is created in interpersonal communication

Communication is a key arena and means for shared-reality creation. Most studies explicitly devoted to shared reality have focused on the opening part of a conversation, that is, a speaker's initial message to an audience. The aspect of communication examined by this research is the evaluative adaptation (tuning) of the messages to the audience's attitude or judgment. The speaker's shared-reality creation is typically assessed by the extent to which the speaker's evaluative representation of the topic matches the audience-tuned view expressed in the message. We first review research on such audience-tuning effects, with a focus on shared-reality goals and conditions facilitating the generalization of shared reality. We then review studies using other paradigms that illustrate factors of shared-reality creation in communication, including mere message production, grounding, validation responses, and communication about commonly known information (including stereotypes) in intragroup communication. The different lines of research reveal the potency, but also boundary conditions, of communication effects on shared reality.