Peer-assisted learning is now being recognised as an effective learning strategy to support the development of health professionals. Furthermore, adopting coaching style dialogue and conversation enhances learning and development for both the coach and coachee and, in this instance, for year 1 and year 3 student paramedics. This article describes how the implementation of peer-assisted learning into the classroom setting can help to support student paramedics in the development of their own clinical skills and knowledge. It describes broadly the evaluation findings of a session whereby year 3 student paramedics coached year 1 student paramedics to further develop a range of clinical skills through demonstration and discussion. A summary overview of the findings reflects the multiple benefits of this innovative approach to facilitate learning, including a notable increase in professional knowledge and skills for both groups of students.
Background: Prehospital clinical decision-making is a complex, evolving skill. Typically, there are multiple possible diagnoses and several potential treatment pathways to be considered, and usually prehospital clinicians have to base their decisions on imperfect information. Biases will inevitably compete to influence clinicians as they attempt to weigh the probabilities of diagnoses, degrees of certainty and permissible risks in their decision-making process. With experience, as intuition and tacit knowledge develop, paramedics will depend less on explicit knowledge and algorithm-based decision-making tools. Paramedics must strive to strike the right balance between the intuitive and analytical aspects of clinical decision-making, while maintaining an awareness of the human factors that will influence them in this process if optimal clinical decisions and therefore patient outcomes are to be achieved. This case study illustrates complex decision-making in the prehospital setting, with a focus on the influence of bias.
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