PP8 Face to face cross skilling of doctors during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in the UK, our intensive care unit (ICU) began making plans to rapidly expand. In order to meet safe staffing levels, doctors that had not previously worked in an ICU required training prior to being redeployed to this environment. With social distancing a priority our aim was to keep the face to face interaction limited, whilst ensuring optimal training. Epidemiological uncertainty of pandemic speed and spread meant this project was also time pressured. Summary of Work A two hour face to face training session was constructed, which supplemented the pre-course reading material. The group numbers were limited to 20 participants per session, and divided into four groups of five rotating around each station. The training session consisted of: 30 minutes of simulated proning practise.1 30 minutes simulated donning and doffing of personal protective equipment (PPE).2 One hour ICU orientation, to the unit and equipment. Participants were asked to complete a feedback survey following the course. Summary of Results Within three weeks the team successfully trained 144 doctors. Feedback was submitted with a total of 88 responses. All participants were from surgical specialties with a roughly even mix of specialty registrars (36.4%), SHOs (29.6%) and foundations doctors (27.3%). The majority of which (76.1%) had never worked in ICU. Before the training programme 23.8% felt ‘‘very prepared’ or ‘fairly prepared’ to work on ICU, 27.3% felt ‘neither prepared or unprepared’ with nearly half (48.9%) feeling ‘fairly unprepared’ or ‘very unprepared’. Following completion of the course the majority (59.8%) felt ‘very prepared’ or ‘fairly prepared’, 24.1% felt ‘neither prepared or unprepared’ but only 16.1%felt ‘fairly unprepared’ with none filing ‘very unprepared’. Upon completion of the course the 95.4% of participants felt confident with donning and doffing PPE. Discussion, conclusions and recommendations We rapidly designed a simulation based training session for a diverse group of doctors with often no ICU experience. We dramatically improved their confidence with both working on the unit and important health & safety procedures, under time critical conditions. References COVID-19: personal protective equipment use for aerosol generating procedures. Public Health England; https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-personal-protective-equipment-use-for-aerosol-generating-procedures Guidance for: Prone positioning in adult critical care; Faculty of intensive care medicine and Intensive care society. https://www.ficm.ac.uk/sites/default/files/prone_position_in_adult_critical_care_2019.pdf