Elena Power Centre for Simulation and Human Factors

The Centre

The Elena Power Centre for Simulation and Human Factors is based at Epsom Hospital, within the Post Graduate Medical Education Centre. It is a dedicated state of the art resource for both pre and post graduate interprofessional education. 

The Elena Power Centre boasts a large, flexible simulation area that can be used to replicate a multitude of environments including resus, ward, theatres and community settings, and is home to several state-of-the art, high fidelity manikins which can be used to replicate a wide range of real life emergencies and hospital-based scenarios. The Elena Power Centre has a comfortable debriefing room with AV links that can accommodate up to 16 participants.

 

You can see the centre in this short video made for the London Simulation Network (LSN), with whom the centre is affiliated, here

 

The Elena Power Centre was officially opened by Jeremy Vine in March 2015.

 

In 2019 the Elena Power Centre achieved accreditation by the Association of Simulation Practice in Healthcare. 

 

 

In January 2020 Chris Grayling (MP) joined us to celebrate the donation of new manikins to the Elena Power Centre. 

 

Centre activities

 

Simulation Courses

Located in Epsom Postgraduate Medical Centre (PGMC), the Elena Power Centre runs a number of simulation and human factors courses available to all staff across the trust. We also run simulation programmes for Foundation Year Doctors and Medical Students. 

 

The majority of our courses are CRISIS (Care, Recognition, Initial, Stabilisation In Simulation) courses. Our CRISIS course family have been specifically designed and tailored for staff employed by Epsom and St Helier hospitals. Healthcare Assistants, Nursing Associates, Registered Nurses, Allied Health Professionals, Physician Associates and Doctors train as an interprofessional team in the recognition and management of deteriorating patients. Simulation scenarios are followed by debriefs which highlight the need for using human factors skills such as communication and teamwork to improve care outcomes and patient safety.

 

Our CRISIS courses include:

• Adult CRISIS

• Critical Care CRISIS

• Emergency Department CRISIS

• Neonatal CRISIS

• Obstetric CRISIS

• Paediatric CRISIS.

 

Outside of our CRISIS course family we provide interprofessional Anaesthetic simulation courses and End of Life simulation courses in the Elena Power Centre, as well as uniprofessional simulation courses for Foundation Year Doctors and Medical Students. 

As our simulation manikins are portable, we are additionally able to provide simulation courses outside of the Elena Power Centre. During our 'In-situ' courses we take simulation equipment to different clinical areas and run simulation scenarios with interprofessional teams. Clinical areas we visit regularly include Critical Care, Recovery and Theatres.

 

Human Factors work

The Elena Power Centre for Simulation and Human Factors has been closely involved with human factors, patient safety and quality work from it's inception. The team regularly attend the Serious Incident Panel and have contributed human factors expertise to various incident investigation work. To promote understanding of the impact of human factors in healthcare the Elena Power Centre provide an Introduction to Human Factors and an Advanced Human Factors course which can be booked by any staff member. The team are also involved as faculty on the Trust's popular Quality Improvement Practitioner course.

At a regional level, in preparation for the rollout of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF),  the Elena Power Centre were responsible for delivering the PSIRF Systems Approach to Learning From Patient Safety Incidents course to delegates from accross South West London.

 

Other Work

We have developed a SWARM guide and fictional example video, for use by those who wish to use the Swarm debrief learning response as part of their Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) work. Swarm is one of the four learning responses and can be used whenever there is something new to learn, and does not have to be initiated by a patient safety incident. Typically, a Swarm debrief happens within 48 hours after the event and includes the multiprofessional staff that were involved.

How to use the Swarm guide

The Swarm Guide suggests useful phrases and prompts across three distinct phases, starting with 'setting the scene'. This phase is important as it helps to create group psychological safety, where all participants can feel safe to speak up and share their perspectives, without fear of ridicule or reprimand.

A Swarm debrief is informed by the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety SEIPS and Systems Thinking principles, that theorise most problems and possibilities for improvement belong to the work system. Therefore, the aim of a Swarm is to understand and explore important or relevant work system factors that helped or hindered event outcomes and crucially whether these system issues are present in our everyday work.  You can spend most of the debrief 'exploring WSF & everyday work' as the questions and prompts within this phase support a curious approach.

Finally, you can draw the debrief to a close in 'next steps', by thanking participants, summarising key learning and checking for understanding.  Then informing participants of how you will document and escalate any important system issues or findings, so that these can inform ongoing or future improvement work. 

You can watch the Swarm video here to see an example of how to use the guide in practice. 

If you want to find out more about SEIPS, you can watch one of our other educational films 'Just a cup of Tea' used in the National Patient Safety Specialist Training and SEIPS Maternity. 

The centre also makes training and information films which are available for use by all departments and published on the ESTH Youtube channel. Our film Make or Break: Incivility in the Workplace which has been viewed all over the world, highlights how incivility affects all of us in the NHS and the impact of incivility on patient safety. The film is embedded as part of a workshop in a number of simulation and human factors courses and allows staff to reflect on their real-life experiences of both incivility and active kindness. The film can be viewed here

 

 

 

In Sept 2023 we were invited to share our Maternity human factors work within SWLICS at the Patient Safety Congress, where we were on a Panel with Donna Ockenden and Tracey McCormack from the NMC.