The Physiotherapy service provides an out-of-hours (emergency) respiratory service 24/7; this service is provided by a team of Physiotherapists from across the spectrum of specialties and grades. Staff need to be confident and competent in a broad range of assessment and treatment skills to enable a safe and sustainable service to be delivered.
Traditionally the competency training was delivered in classroom and practical sessions but feedback from a staff survey highlighted that this approach needed an overhaul as it was not meeting staffs learning styles and lead to some staff feeling underprepared, under confident and occasionally lacking competency.
Owen saw the potential in using high fidelity simulation to bridge this gap in training.
He led the creation of the first high fidelity on-call physiotherapy course. In preparation he undertook training with OxSTaR on how to successfully create and facilitate high fidelity patient simulation training. Working with experienced OxSTaR staff he created bespoke patient scenarios to facilitate a challenging but safe simulation experience to back-up their classroom and practical training.
Staff feedback has been extremely positive about the quality of the experience, they all wanted to do more simulation training as the potential to practice in a simulation setting was not something they had ever done before. Owen and Alex Wilson (Clinical Specialist Physiotherapist Critical Care) have ran the course a number of times now and it is hoped they will develop further courses to suit the current training demands.