Preparing Paramedic Students with Video-Assisted Debriefing at Rowan College

Increasing student awareness

Using video for debriefing helped Ed bring students to a new level of self-awareness in areas like:

Awareness of time. "In any high-stress situation, there's time dilation," he explains. Having video for debriefing allowed him to show students how much time really elapsed during the scenarios. For example, he could show a student the video and explain, "This patient started to deteriorate earlier than you realized. Let’s look at vital signs. Notice this vital sign was already changing. That was your clue that something was starting to happen – and it’s important to catch those clues."

Refining psychomotor skills. By capturing and zooming in with the SimCapture camera, he can easily highlight issues with techniques like intubation. Then he can talk the student through their technique and how to improve it.

Body language. "One of the things that we hear all the time, especially with the affective domain, is that the students have never looked at their own body language," he says. "So while they think they're being polite and building rapport, they go back and look at the videos. We had one student who said, 'I didn’t realize how angry I looked, talking with a patient.'"

"That’s one of the things we love that our students are able to do," he shares. [It's] a huge win for the students – because we have a lot of them come back and say, ‘I didn’t realize what I was doing.'"

"To give them that view of themselves from the outside...It can be limitless in this education. I think it has the potential to really change the way we do debriefing, change the way we educate students – for the better."

Asynchronous debriefing

Storing video in the SimCapture Cloud allowed Ed to give students the opportunity to watch the videos and review the annotations at home.

"While we can debrief them in real-time if we want, often we allow the students to go home, relax, and then they can view the videos in comfort and privacy, reflect on what we've talked about during their debriefing after the sim, and then look at the video and see how what happened fits with what they understood was going on and what our feedback was in our debriefing session."

"We have students that found that very powerful because they can do it, feel comfortable doing it, and be in the right mindset to bring the experience of that simulation into their practice."

Leveraging data

Ed also uses the powerful insights that the SimCapture platform generates – including:

Simulator utilization data
“We can tell how many hours the manikin was used during sim. We used this to help justify the purchase of a new simulator by being able to show how many hours per semester per year the simulators are used, and how many students are interacting with it.”

Documentation of student activity
"In paramedic education, there’s a lot of documentation...for instance, students have to have certain counts of procedures done," he explains. "We’re able to go back and say, ‘Here are the five videos where the student performed a specific skill.'"

"It gives us something we can show the administration from the college," he says. "The first thing that we do is bring up videos of the simulations and say, 'Here's how the students in this program are using what you spend all this money on.'"

A note on psychological safety in simulation

When using video-assisted debriefing with SimCapture, Ed knows it’s critical to make sure that students feel comfortable with the process.

"I tell the students from the beginning: ‘We don't want you to ever think that you failed a simulation. We’re teaching you and we're giving you the experience to work in real-time – and to try things to push your skills to critically think [and] understand things differently.'"

"'Sometimes you're going to use your judgment and get it wrong,'" he adds. "'Or maybe there was a better pathway, and we can discuss that. But it's never used to embarrass [you]. It's the opportunity to learn.'"