Lesson Learnt from the Military Surgeons Using Simulation in Trauma Surgery

Abstract

The low exposure of many trauma team members to severe trauma underlines the need for alternatives to “learning by doing” when the “doing,” in the early stages, involves a trauma patient. This is unacceptable with today’s patient safety requirements and often unobtainable with modern surgical training. Equally in the dynamic, high-pressured environment of managing trauma patients, the risk of errors occurring and miscommunications is rife. Management of a trauma patient, whether in the emergency department, operating theater, or intensive care unit, relies on the performance of the team as a whole and as such will only work with both effective technical skills but also nontechnical skills such as communication or delegation.

The evidence shows that when a trauma team is trained using simulation, there are significant improvements in the quality of teamwork and a reduction in clinical errors in the trained groups.