Anaesthesiology students’ Non-Technical skills: development and evaluation of a behavioural marker system for students (AS-NTS)

Abstract

Background Non-Technical Skills (NTS) are becoming more important in medical education. A lack of NTS was identified as a major reason for unsafe patient care, favouring adverse events and team breakdown. Therefore, the training of NTS should already be implemented in undergraduate teaching. The goal of our study was to develop and validate the Anaesthesiology Students’ Non-Technical Skills (AS-NTS) as a feasible rating tool to assess students’ NTS in emergency and anaesthesiology education. Methods The development of AS-NTS was empirically grounded in expert- and focus groups, field observations and data from NTS in medical fields. Validation, reliability and usability testing was conducted in 98 simulation scenarios, during emergency and anaesthesiology training sessions. Results AS-NTS showed an excellent interrater reliability (mean 0.89), achieved excellent content validity indexes (at least 0.8) and was rated as feasible and applicable by educators. Additionally, we could rule out the influence of the raters’ anaesthesiology and emergency training and experience in education on the application of the rating tool. Conclusions AS-NTS provides a structured approach to the assessment of NTS in undergraduates, providing accurate feedback. The findings of usability, validity and reliability indicate that AS-NTS can be used by anaesthesiologists in different year of postgraduate training, even with little experience in medical education. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-019-1609-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Flipped learning enhances non-technical skill performance in simulation-based education: a randomised controlled trial

“…The emphasis on the importance of early implementation of NTS training is based on the knowledge that NTS are not acquired through clinical practise and routine [ 10 ]. Therefore, many medical faculties have adapted their curricula and implemented simulation-based trainings to address NTS in undergraduate education [ 11 ].…”

Reliability of assessment of medical students’ non-technical skills using a behavioural marker system: does clinical experience matter?

“…Looking more widely, one other study has investigated the relationship between clinical experience and NTS inter-rater reliability. Moll-Khosrawi et al 40 used the Anaesthesiology Students’ Non-Technical Skills (AS-NTS) rating system which is loosely based on ANTS but simplified to have only three ratings per student. This study was not included in table 2 as no indication of raters’ prior expertise with NTS was given, nor any information about the teaching they received on using the BMS prior to the study.…”

Correlation of medical students' situational motivation and performance of non-technical skills during simulation-based emergency training

“…The undergraduate curriculum of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, is based on the spiral curriculum of Harden [29]. To foster learning, some teaching and learning goals are repetitively addressed and trained in consecutive semesters.…”