Enhancing health care non-technical skills: the TINSELS programme

Background and Context: Training in ‘non-technical skills’, social (communication and team work) and cognitive (analytical and personal behaviour) skills, in healthcare have been of great interest over the last decade. Whilst the majority of publications focus on ‘whether’ such education can be successful, they overlook the question of ‘how’ they enhance skills. We designed and piloted an original, theoretically robust and replicable teaching package that addresses non-technical skills in the context of medicines safety through simulation-based inter professional learning: the TINSELS (Training In Non-technical Skills to Enhance Levels of Medicines Safety) Programme. Innovation: A modified Delphi process was completed to identify learning outcomes, and recruitment of multi-professional teams was through local publicity. The faculty developed a three-session simulation based intervention: session one was a simulated ward encounter with multiple medicine related activities; session two was an extended debrief and facilitated discussion; and session three a ‘chamber of horrors’ where inter professional teams identified potential sources of error. Each session was completed in the simulation suite with 6 – 9 participants, lasted approximately 90m minutes, and took place over 2 weeks. Full details of the course will be presented to facilitate dissemination. Implications: Likert scale feedback was collected after the course (1 strongly disagree-5 strongly agree). Mean scores were all greater than 4, with qualitative feedback noting the fidelity of the authentic inter professional learner groups. A previously validated safety attitudes questionnaire found changes in attitudes towards handover of care and perceptions of safety levels in the workplace post intervention. An original, simulation based, multi-professional training programme has been developed with learning and assessment materials available for widespread replication