Feedback, reflection and team learning for COVID-19: development of a novel clinical event debriefing tool

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for healthcare teams. In addition to placing a complicated set of demands on governments, health systems, hospitals and individual healthcare workers, this outbreak also serves as ‘an opportunity to gain important information, some of which is associated with a limited window of opportunity’.1 In rapidly evolving pandemics, the imperative to improve performance creates an urgent need for what Amy Edmondson has described as ‘Execution-as-Learning’, a framework in which teams of front-line providers problem solve on the fly, rather than waiting for answers from leadership.2 For many front-line care providers, this threat has created unique challenges, including rapidly evolving information about presentation and management of disease, surges of patients who are critically ill, shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other resources and risks to personal safety. While all of us have cared for the ill and dying, and faced the fact that our actions as individuals or teams contribute to our patients’ survival, many feel more personally at risk during the COVID-19 crisis. The development of solutions and innovations that come directly from front-line providers needs to be fostered. To help healthcare workers and their leaders gather and process information about teamwork, medical management and crisis resource management for COVID-19, while also providing support to colleagues, we created Debriefing In Suspected …