Anaesthesiology students' Non-Technical skills: development and evaluation of a behavioural marker system for students (AS-NTS)

BACKGROUND

Non-Technical Skills (NTS) are becoming more important in medical education. A lack of NTS was identified as a major reason for unsafe patient care, favouring adverse events and team breakdown. Therefore, the training of NTS should already be implemented in undergraduate teaching. The goal of our study was to develop and validate the Anaesthesiology Students' Non-Technical Skills (AS-NTS) as a feasible rating tool to assess students' NTS in emergency and anaesthesiology education.

METHODS

The development of AS-NTS was empirically grounded in expert- and focus groups, field observations and data from NTS in medical fields. Validation, reliability and usability testing was conducted in 98 simulation scenarios, during emergency and anaesthesiology training sessions.

RESULTS

AS-NTS showed an excellent interrater reliability (mean 0.89), achieved excellent content validity indexes (at least 0.8) and was rated as feasible and applicable by educators. Additionally, we could rule out the influence of the raters' anaesthesiology and emergency training and experience in education on the application of the rating tool.

CONCLUSIONS

AS-NTS provides a structured approach to the assessment of NTS in undergraduates, providing accurate feedback. The findings of usability, validity and reliability indicate that AS-NTS can be used by anaesthesiologists in different year of postgraduate training, even with little experience in medical education.

Assessing the influencers of sales training effectiveness before and after training

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to decipher the possibility of ensuring the effectiveness of sales training by focusing on selected organization-related variables and thereafter aims at making recommendations for enhancing the overall sales training effectiveness. Variables that are under organizations’ control, like training transfer climate, training evaluation and degree of choice (mandatory or by choice) were selected for this study. The study also attempted to understand how these variables influence at pre-training stage and post-training stage.

Design/methodology/approach

This cross-sectional research involved both exploratory and conclusive phases. To test the postulated hypotheses, data were collected in two phases from sales executives of a large oil and gas petrochemical company having the presence across India. A total of 370 sales executives, who were the part of a sales training program, were approached twice, one before the training and once after the eight weeks of training. Data from the respondents who completed both pre- and post-training survey (255) were used for analyses.

Findings

The results indicate that all the three predictor variables – training awareness, perceived transfer climate and the presence of an appropriate training evaluation mechanism, influence trainees’ motivation to learn. The results depict that motivation to learn mediates the association between the predictor variables and the resultant variable. Also, degree of choice was found to moderate the association between motivation to learn and sales training effectiveness. The research reinforces the significance of pre-training factors in designing sales training programs to ensure its better effectiveness.

Research limitations/implications

The present study captures organizational-level variables as they are under the control of the organization and can be managed. The study included both motivation to learn and training effectiveness in the hypothesized model to understand the motivational issues in a holistic perspective. The outcomes of this research strengthen the role of trainees’ motivation to learn as a connecting variable between organizational-level variables and sales training effectiveness. Thus, the outcome of this study contributes to the literature on training motivation as well as training effectiveness.

Practical implications

The findings of this study are significant for sales organizations or the organizations offering sales training aiming to enhance overall training effectiveness. Training managers must focus on these factors and ensure that all the pre-training organizational-level variables are very well-taken care of. This implies that the trainees need to be well informed about the training calendar, training policies, training content, expectations from them and how the program will be evaluated after training, along with appropriate positive transfer climate. Organizations should also include proper training evaluation mechanism to measure training at different levels.

Originality/value

This study is an attempt to decipher the possibility of ensuring the effectiveness of sales training by focusing on select organization-related variables, and thereafter aims at making recommendations for enhancing the overall sales training effectiveness. The study’s uniqueness lies in simultaneous examination of influence of various variables, and that too at two different points of time (before and after the training). These two perspectives are apparently missing in the existing sales training literature.

Situation Awareness Catches On: What? So What? Now What?

Human factors/ergonomics professionals regularly study the situation awareness (SA) problems of pilots, air traffic controllers, automobile drivers, power plant workers, ambulance dispatchers, urban search and rescue professionals, and unmanned vehicle operators, to mention a few. The challenge has been to define SA operationally and devise measurement strategies that focus on attention and recall on the one hand and relevant actions on the other. Although there have been many successes, challenges remain. This review is organized in three parts. Under “What?” we discuss definitions of SA, their interpretations in terms of human information processing and ecological psychological theories, as well as techniques for measuring SA. Under “So what?” we introduce SA applications'information requirements, technological tools, and training systems'that support the way people work and live. Finally, under “Now what?” we discuss future directions for SA research.

Aviation Automation: General Perspectives and Specific Guidance for the Design of Modes and Alerts

Automation has long been a significant component of the flight deck, to the point that it is often referred to as a “team member.” This review notes the recent insights into aviation human-automation interaction, starting with a quick tour of the modern flight deck to illustrate the current state of the art in applying automation in safety-critical systems. The review then contrasts three prevalent perspectives on applying automation: those that focus on the technology itself, on automation within the operating environment, and on automation as a team member. Next, this review discusses two prevalent forms of aviation automation for which significant research and design guidance has been developed: automation based on modal behaviors, such as the flight management system, and alerting functions, which direct attention or motivate action as warranted by events. Finally, the review notes considerations regarding the certification, testing, and evaluation of automation (and human-automation interaction) in the safety-critical domain of aviation.

Principles for Designing Effective and Efficient Training of Complex Cognitive Skills

This chapter describes principles for the design of training of complex cognitive tasks that pose relatively great challenges to the cognitive capacity of the trainee. Using the theoretical framework of cognitive load, we argue that the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture need to be taken into account in the design of effective and efficient training. For training complex cognitive tasks, this means that cognitive load needs to be controlled by optimizing the relationship between (a) the intrinsic load imposed by the complexity of the training task and (b) the effective (germane) and ineffective (extraneous) loads imposed by the design of the training tasks. Design principles for training tasks, for sequences of training tasks in fixed training programs (in which all trainees receive the same sequence), and for ways to create adaptive or personalized training programs (in which each trainee receives a personalized sequence) are discussed. Simple to complex sequencing of training tasks, decreasing support, increasing contextual interference, and spacing are discussed as effective principles for fostering learning and transfer in fixed training programs. System-controlled, shared-responsibility, and advisory models for task selection are discussed as possible models to be used to foster learning and transfer in adaptive training programs.