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Table Top simulations for extreme weather events
15 Plays13 days ago
In this episode, we sit down with Professor Tracy Levett-Jones to explore an innovative approach to preparing healthcare professionals for the realities of major weather events. Drawing on her extensive expertise in nursing education and simulation pedagogy, Tracy shares how tabletop simulation is being used to build critical thinking, teamwork, and adaptive decision-making in the face of disasters such as floods, bushfires, and extreme storms. She shares how these engaging, low-cost approaches build critical thinking, teamwork, and disaster readiness in a safe learning environment, offering practical insights for educators and clinicians alike.
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:41
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Ready, here we go. good morning to another simulation happy hour. I'm Kerry
00:00:48
Tracy Levett-Jones
Thank you.
00:00:50
Jenny
i'm jenny bassett
00:00:52
Melanie Barlow
I'm Mel Barlow and Jane will be coming shortly. Sydney traffic.
00:00:58
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
And today, team we have or audience we have, a wonderful guest, Tracey Levitt-Jones. Our history with Tracey goes back a very long way, being in the other end of the scale of age with academia.
00:01:16
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
I first met Tracey when I was a very young academic at a conference where I was introducing some aspects of simulation. And I was fortunate to begin my relationship with Tracy way, way back then.
00:01:29
Tracy Levett-Jones
Thank
Tracey's Contributions to Simulation in Education
00:01:30
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Tracy has been well versed in simulation across different pedagogies, different modalities, always been somebody who has contributed significantly to collaborative simulation across multiple universities. And one of our last projects was TAG Team.
00:01:31
Tracy Levett-Jones
you.
00:01:51
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
I'm so excited to have Tracey on board today and we might get started with Tracey. Welcome and tell us a little bit about you.
00:02:03
Tracy Levett-Jones
Thanks, Kerry.
00:02:03
Jenny
Thank
00:02:04
Tracy Levett-Jones
It is so exciting to be here and be part of this podcast. So a little bit about me. I love the way you reflected on our shared history. And when I think about it, it was almost 20 years ago that we met.
00:02:19
Tracy Levett-Jones
And we were young academics, but we both shared a passion for high quality, interactive, engaging and authentic students.
00:02:30
Tracy Levett-Jones
teaching and learning experiences and they align so beautifully with simulation. You'd had a lot more experience in simulation than me, but I think as with all things simulation, we tend to learn on the go.
00:02:43
Tracy Levett-Jones
And my real passion has always been evidence-based education. So it's all very well
Impact of Education Beyond University
00:02:50
Tracy Levett-Jones
to do great stuff, but if you're not evaluating it, how do you know it actually works?
00:02:54
Jenny
Thank you.
00:02:55
Tracy Levett-Jones
And we want to know more than did students like it? We want to actually know, did it have an impact on the person or the experience or the community well beyond the university confines?
00:03:09
Tracy Levett-Jones
We want to know beyond the horizon, did it impact people, the people for whom we are responsible? So that's been my passion. And I guess as a clinician, my focus is always on patient safety.
00:03:26
Tracy Levett-Jones
So that aligns beautifully with simulation. And so all of my teaching and my research has always said, how does this impact the experience for the person? Does
Sustainability and Planetary Health in Education
00:03:37
Tracy Levett-Jones
it make their care safer, more empathic, more effective?
00:03:43
Tracy Levett-Jones
So that passion and its direct implications for simulation is what sustained me for a long, long time.
00:03:53
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Fantastic, Tracy. And there's so much more to you than simulation as well.
00:03:56
Tracy Levett-Jones
Thank you.
00:03:57
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
I mean, one only has to go to a nursing textbook library or a nursing journal and you'll see Tracy cited everywhere or even, of course, the author.
00:04:08
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Tracy, I'm excited to have you here today because what you are working in in the space of sustainability and looking after our planet and what we do inside of education and even simulation to really get our learners to be engaged in this space and to be cognisant of what they do as not just students but as healthcare professionals and how we can make changes.
00:04:25
Tracy Levett-Jones
Thank you.
00:04:38
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
I'm also excited the fact that when we talk about simulation, so often people associate with an inside classroom event, a laboratory event,
00:04:59
Tracy Levett-Jones
Thank you.
00:05:12
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
this is why, apart from just seeing or hearing your voice today, You can hear that I'm an absolute guru or, you know, fan of the Tracey Levitt Jones Club.
00:05:22
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
But
Shift to Planetary Health and Real-Life Scenarios
00:05:23
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
can you tell me today what has sparked your interest in using tabletop simulation to teach healthcare professionals about major weather events?
00:05:37
Tracy Levett-Jones
Absolutely. So I might just start by saying or explaining why planetary health and why under that umbrella of planetary health sits mitigation, adaptation, sustainability, climate change, all those other things that we hear about.
00:05:54
Tracy Levett-Jones
And people often say to me, how did you go from clinical reasoning, patient safety, empathy, to planetary health? It seems like a complete divergence for what I normally do. But if we think about the fact that you cannot have healthy people on a sick planet, that explains it all.
00:06:12
Tracy Levett-Jones
We are living in the Anthropocene. There are things happening in the world that are having a direct impact on the health and wellbeing of the people we care for, our families, our children and future generations. there's so many nurses, there's half a million of us in Australia.
00:06:30
Tracy Levett-Jones
We need to stand up and say we must do something about the changes that are happening to the planet and to the climate. We have, I think, both an opportunity and a responsibility to do something. So that started my work in planetary health about three years ago. And it started with an interest, a passion and absolute commitment to nature.
00:06:53
Tracy Levett-Jones
You know, my happy place is being in nature and seeing areas of nature being destroyed was heartbreaking. And knowing that climate change disproportionately impacts people, you know, it's fine for me. I can go from an air-conditioned house to an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned office. You know, I'm fine. But what about people that have unstable housing or are homeless or older people, younger people, pregnant women, people that don't have resources, they are being disproportionately impacted. So as a nurse, we have an imperative to really focus on anything that impacts them.
00:07:32
Tracy Levett-Jones
So to get to the tabletop simulation, one of the things we realised when we were teaching students about planetary health and adaptation, extreme weather events, they were saying things like,
00:07:45
Tracy Levett-Jones
but I don't see this in my practice. I don't know what nurses are doing in this area. So we worked from the framework that you cannot be what you cannot see. So we started to do interviews with nurses and with some midwives to say, tell us what's really happening.
00:08:02
Tracy Levett-Jones
We started with celebrating nurses engaged in amazing sustainability initiatives. And then we realised that was fantastic. But the other aspect was adaptation. Nurses and midwives that were responding to extreme weather events. So we interviewed, think it was 10 or 12 people from around Australia, and their stories were mind-blowing.
00:08:27
Tracy Levett-Jones
I might get a chance to tell you about some of them later. But we thought then, okay, we've created this beautiful resource and a report that people can read. It's on our website. Students can read it.
00:08:39
Tracy Levett-Jones
But then what we wanted to do was engage students. How can they be part the story? How can they be the protagonist in their own extreme weather event?
00:08:50
Tracy Levett-Jones
So that's where the extreme weather event tabletop simulation came from. We did not want to create disaster
Leadership and Problem-Solving in Crisis Scenarios
00:08:57
Tracy Levett-Jones
nurses, that's a postgraduate course, but we wanted to raise students' awareness and say, look, you may be involved in this type of situation. We know 60 to 80% of all healthcare professionals report being involved in an extreme weather event.
00:09:11
Tracy Levett-Jones
So we wanted to say to them, this will be part of your lived experience now and much more into the future. So we wanted to create an evolving conversation. And we could have just given them a lecture.
00:09:23
Tracy Levett-Jones
We could have just had tutorial. But what we wanted to do is harness the beauty of simulation, the interactivity, the spontaneity, the engagement that only simulation can elicit. And so we created team tabletop simulation, has six scenarios, and each of them are linked.
00:09:43
Tracy Levett-Jones
to real experiences, real nurses or midwives experiences. And we take them through the unfolding event and ask them to respond.
00:09:55
Melanie Barlow
Fantastic. Thank you, Tracy. Could you give us an example of an actual kind of scenario that you've created?
00:10:04
Tracy Levett-Jones
Yeah, sure.
00:10:05
Melanie Barlow
why? Why did you focus on that? You've given us a bit of an outline on that, but I guess to help listeners kind of understand the concept a little bit more.
00:10:15
Tracy Levett-Jones
So we wanted to situate the tabletop simulation in the Australian context. So the people we interviewed were from around Australia and they described extreme weather events like bushfires, cyclones, thunderstorm, asthma, heat waves, floods.
00:10:33
Tracy Levett-Jones
So the one I'm going to talk about is one that really moved me. It was a young midwife that found herself being evacuated from flood in northern New South Wales a couple of years ago. The levee had been breached and the only area in this community that was out of the flood zone was a small primary school on a hill. So she was evacuated there with her partner, her brother-in-law, her mother, and then over a couple of hours about 100 people turned up.
00:11:09
Tracy Levett-Jones
These were a lot of older people and they were coming with splash injuries to their eyes from flood water. A lot of them were on anticoagulants and being injured during the evacuation, so they were bleeding.
00:11:23
Tracy Levett-Jones
People had been evacuated rapidly. They hadn't had adequate warning. So they were turning up, know, people with diabetes type one that had turned up without their glucometer their insulin or any food.
00:11:38
Tracy Levett-Jones
There was one mum who had a two week old baby who swam through flood waters with her newborn baby in an esky to get to safety.
00:11:50
Tracy Levett-Jones
There were quite a few young mums, some that were breastfeeding, some that were formula fed, but that evacuated so quickly that the formula fed babies, most of them had turned up with bottles, always to sterilize bottles or formula. So soon I arrived there, And there was her, an enrolled nurse and a retired paramedic.
00:12:11
Tracy Levett-Jones
And she realised she had to coordinate this event, this, you know, situation. So as nurses and midwives and other health care professionals realise, we have domain-specific knowledge and skills, but we have much broader knowledge and skills, the ability to communicate, collaborate, lead. delegate and that's what came to the fore. Soon realised that she needed to break these people up and so she had people boiling water in the canteen that they could cool and use to flush out eyes to clean wounds. She had someone go into the lost property and tear up clothes that she could use for bandages. She said go into the canteen and say whatever food is there we need to cook this food because people were freezing and they were hungry so Can you cook whatever food there is? She had her partner and her brother-in-law go on jet skis to people's homes to see if the fridges were still cold because they often are to get out the insulin things like that. She said to
Objectives and Authentic Learning Experiences
00:13:16
Tracy Levett-Jones
some of the breastfeeding mums, would you feel comfortable feeding these other babies? And they did.
00:13:23
Tracy Levett-Jones
What she realised was she could bring a community of people together. and she could lead that community. And she had to support them. And obviously they were scared and frightened and cold and hungry. She had to support them for, I think was about 48 hours before they could evacuate them to another major centre. And then only a couple of little dinghies were available. So she had to say, these are the priorities. And at the same time, as healthcare professionals do, she was documenting everything so that when they were evacuated, she could say, This person's a type 1 diabetes, you need to get them assessed really quick. Can you look at this two-week-old baby really quickly? So she documented everything. She coordinated the evacuation
00:14:04
Tracy Levett-Jones
without any experience in disaster management or triage, but just all those deeply held skills that we take for granted or often overlook. she used those skills. And so through the tabletop simulation, that's what we wanted to say to students, and we've also done it with healthcare professionals. So you've got these skills. You may feel completely out of your comfort zone, but you've got a set of skills that you may well be called upon to use.
00:14:34
Tracy Levett-Jones
So that was just one example. There were many other examples. Incredible nurses and midwives doing wonderful things in extreme situations that I could not even imagine. And because they're real and authentic, they really capture students' imagination and they want to be involved.
00:14:57
Jenny
Great. That's a great example, Tracey.
00:14:58
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Thank you.
00:15:00
Jenny
That is amazing sort of a story. Never in your career would you think you might be caught in a situation like that. So it's a great description of what you've given us. But what were the main skills or insights that you hope that the participants and the students would come away after the simulation week?
00:15:20
Tracy Levett-Jones
as well as we wanted them to develop some confidence in that if they were involved in the situation, they didn't have to have all the answers. They didn't have to have all the equipment, all the resources, all the personnel, but they could do something and that they had enough general knowledge and skills to do something and to be involved and to step up. So we wanted that.
00:15:46
Tracy Levett-Jones
But the other thing we really wanted, this started off as our primary goal, we wanted them to have meaningful conversations about the changing climate.
00:15:57
Tracy Levett-Jones
And we wanted them to say, this is happening in our world. Excuse me. What does it mean? What does it mean for the immediate response to an extreme weather event?
00:16:07
Tracy Levett-Jones
But as a healthcare professional, what is my responsibility in terms of what do I need to learn where are my opportunities for activism? Where do I need to advocate? I need to understand, for example, who is likely to be disproportionately impacted. And I need to be a voice for people that may not have a voice. So we wanted them walk away saying, more than anything, there's so much more I need to know.
00:16:35
Tracy Levett-Jones
There is so much I need to learn. And I need to be part of a movement that will really have an impact. You know, with half a million nurses, for example, in Australia, imagine if all of those nurses stood up and said, these are the things that are impacting the climate, both in my local area, nationally and internationally.
00:16:55
Tracy Levett-Jones
And I will do something. Can't do everything, but I will take action and I will be an activist. I will advocate. I will vote responsibly and I will learn as much as I can.
00:17:08
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Fantastic. How fortunate are those learners to have been in that simulation?
00:17:10
Tracy Levett-Jones
Thank you.
00:17:15
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Tracy, my question is around the engagement of the learners in terms of tabletop does not require a lot of technology.
00:17:25
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
So there's often a premise that, you know, the higher the technology, the greater the level of realism. So my question is, How did you design this tabletop so that it did feel real and engaging without all of that high-tech equipment?
00:17:44
Tracy Levett-Jones
So talking to simulation experts, you know that simulation is a wide range, a continuum of either what we used to call fidelity or what we call authenticity. And I think the most important thing for any simulation is that you can put hand your heart and say, this is authentic.
00:18:02
Tracy Levett-Jones
It is relevant to practice. It is something that students will use in their future careers. And preferably, it is drawn from an authentic situation. So the fact that we could say to students, these are authentic stories. These are real stories. These are not just scenarios that we made up because we thought they'd be interesting. These are based on real nurses and real midwives stories. That captured them straight away. It's a little bit like if you go to a movie and it says, based on a true story, I don't know about you, but that captures me straight away. So we were able to say students, this is based on a true story.
00:18:42
Tracy Levett-Jones
And the fact that we didn't just present whole story, but we presented it in an unfolding manner, it just, we didn't know how it would work, to be honest, because we weren't giving them all the bells and whistles. You know, they did this often in tutorials and sometimes in labs, sometimes in workshops. So they didn't have, you know, exciting equipment or anything. They just had set of cards, basically.
00:19:06
Tracy Levett-Jones
And then they were prompted by the facilitator move on. next card, next card. So it could have, you know, really been a disaster. But the fact that it was real and it was unfolding, it kept their attention.
00:19:23
Tracy Levett-Jones
And in fact,
Interprofessional Collaboration and Reflection
00:19:25
Tracy Levett-Jones
we often ran out of time. You know, we thought the simulation would go 40, 60 minutes. There were some that went for two hours and the students wanted to keep talking about it. So it just gripped them.
00:19:37
Tracy Levett-Jones
Also because... They knew they weren't being tested on it. They knew it wasn't high stakes, but they knew it depended on them to work collaboratively. They knew that not one of them had the answers.
00:19:49
Tracy Levett-Jones
So they needed to really work together to use their critical and constructive thinking, their imagination. It allowed them to draw on their lived experiences.
00:20:01
Tracy Levett-Jones
You know, some of them came... from rural settings, so they had different experiences. Some had been were in the army, so they had different experiences.
00:20:15
Tracy Levett-Jones
So they all had different experiences. Some had been evacuation centres. So their ability to come together and to work together, knowing they weren't being examined, it just kept the momentum and kept their attention and yeah allowed it to work
00:20:38
Melanie Barlow
Amazing, thanks Tracy.
00:20:39
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Fantastic.
00:20:39
Melanie Barlow
I love how the focus is increasingly on authenticity and less on technology and high fidelity air quotes. Such a good direction.
00:20:53
Melanie Barlow
So can I ask then what does a flow of one of these simulations look like? So how do you How do you pre-brief it?
00:21:04
Melanie Barlow
How do you facilitate it? And then what does a debrief for a tabletop kind of simulation look like?
00:21:12
Tracy Levett-Jones
Because we realised that many of the educators that would be facilitating these simulations would have no disaster experience, no experience or knowledge about planetary health, we didn't want them to be out of depth.
00:21:30
Tracy Levett-Jones
We wanted to provide an experience that required no prior learning for either the facilitator or the students. So we provided very structured resources that anyone could pick up and run with it.
00:21:43
Tracy Levett-Jones
So like most simulations and certainly most tabletop simulations, because that's not an approach we invented, you know, a lot of tabletop simulations are used by councils, by community centres, you know, for responding to a cyber threat, responding to a disaster. So we followed the basic premise, which is,
00:22:13
Tracy Levett-Jones
So in the briefing, we explained to students that these simulations were derived from authentic experiences. that they don't have to have all the knowledge they need. There'll be times they'll feel completely out of their depth and we just want them to respond in the best way possible.
00:22:32
Tracy Levett-Jones
We
Building Confidence and Advocacy
00:22:32
Tracy Levett-Jones
tell them that we're giving a little bit of background about climate change and how this is becoming... Climate change is having an impact on the world, the community, and the...
00:22:49
Tracy Levett-Jones
the systems that they'll be working within. So we want to emphasise that this is relevant to their future practice. So it's not just an idea that we thought would be fun. It's, you know, this is helping to prepare them for their future practice.
00:23:04
Tracy Levett-Jones
We emphasise that it's working collaboratively as part of a team, that it's drawing on those deep skills that they have. and we want them to have fun and just go through the experience. So it's not a very long briefing session because we want the focus to be on the actual simulation and the debrief.
00:23:23
Tracy Levett-Jones
So in the simulation, each group, so the groups are usually four to six students roughly, but they are of different sizes. And I should say that we say to the facilitators, you can do this in any creative way you like. It's designed to be flexible, but generally,
00:23:39
Tracy Levett-Jones
in small groups. Each group is given a set of cards that describes a different scenario. As I said before, bushfires, floods, cyclones, heat waves, thunderstorm, asthma events, those sort of things. And they're told they can turn over the first two cards. The first two cards just provide the background, that's all.
00:24:01
Tracy Levett-Jones
And then when they've read that, they've had the briefing, they're ready to go, the facilitator says, turn over one card. And the card situates them. You know, you have been,
00:24:15
Tracy Levett-Jones
you're in northern Queensland and there's been a cyclone and you've been told, you've been asked to go to the local basketball stadium where there's going to be a number of people coming because it's an evacuation centre. So can you just go there, coordinate, help, get things set up?
00:24:32
Tracy Levett-Jones
And that's basically all the information they get. And then there's some questions like, so are you going to do? What are you prioritize? What do you need? What are your concerns? And so they're completely out of their depth, but they have to start thinking, right, do I have first aid kits? Is there enough water? Is there anyone, any other healthcare professionals? You know, how many people are coming?
00:24:53
Tracy Levett-Jones
You know, those sort of things. So they just have to really brainstorm. And after about 10 minutes, they get given the next cut. So 40 people have arrived. These are the type of injuries they've got. You're told that there is a midwife there.
00:25:10
Tracy Levett-Jones
You're told that there is these many community members. What are you going to do now? And it's starting to get dark. And they're worried about the power going off. So what do you need? What equipment do you need? Where can you get that equipment from? So they're just continuing to brainstorm. And then the next card is usually one that, you know, raises the level of complexity bit. So in that particular scenario, you're being told that the Riverside Caravan Park is being evacuated. And in that caravan park, you know, there's a lot of people that come from disadvantaged backgrounds, women escaping domestic violence, people with substance abuse problems, people that they've been located there, that's their first stop after they get out of prison. And all of those people are going. So now they've got to think of the psychological consequences of women and children, you know, escaping domestic violence and ex-prisoners and people with substance abuse.
00:26:07
Tracy Levett-Jones
How they going to keep all these people safe? So it just keeps just upping the ante a little bit and making them think very constructively about keep, basically keeping people safe and caring for their psychological and emotional needs. And knowing that they can't do everything, but who can they call on? Who's in their group that they can call on?
00:26:30
Tracy Levett-Jones
And it just proceeds. There's not that many cards like that, maybe four or five. And then it goes to the debrief where they reflect on their experiences.
00:26:44
Tracy Levett-Jones
How did they feel? Is the situation unfolded? what were their key challenges, because that's where the whole group come together and they tell a little bit about the different scenarios and they look for similarities. And it's really what lightbulb moments did they have?
00:27:01
Tracy Levett-Jones
You know, what worked? What, you know, what did they learn? There is, you know, depending on the amount of time and the level of the student or the learner and the participant, there are some higher order questions that we also give them. And we also then finish with, so if you had to advise this community about how to prepare for a potential future event, what advice would you give them?
00:27:28
Tracy Levett-Jones
So it's those type of questions that really just takes them on a journey.
00:27:33
Jenny
Oh, I think I'd like to have a go at this simulation, Tracey. It's sounding more and more exciting the more you tell us about it. Now that you've run the simulations, can you share with our listeners how has the simulation helped different healthcare roles to learn about communication in these situations and to work together in a crisis?
00:27:56
Tracy Levett-Jones
Oh, thanks, Jenny. I think what it has taught, and certainly taught me and taught the facilitators, is there are times as nurses, we need to drop the title nurse and remember that we are healthcare professionals. these type of simulations allow the learner to say, we are all in this together. We are one team.
00:28:29
Tracy Levett-Jones
They don't want to hear that. But it's how do we all come together and how do we solve the unfolding problems that we encountered in the simulation, may encounter in the future? How do we communicate? How do we delegate? How do we recognise I can do this, but you're really good at that. How do we call on their lived experiences, their personal and professional experiences to work together to care for the community members or the, because some of the simulations are situated in a hospital, in a university, so different places, but what do we need? You know, how can we call upon all the people? You know, some of the simulations bring in maintenance staff or bring in security staff.
00:29:13
Tracy Levett-Jones
There are times when we just need to be one team, which is a really good experience for nurses, because we tend, and other healthcare professionals, we tend to work in silos, they're very comfortable in silos. But this simulation allows them to say, hang on a minute, how can we best use all of our resources, our shared resources, our individual resources and expertise to really respond to the unfolding situation?
00:29:43
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
That interprofessional, that collaboration, awesome. Tracey, out of the simulation, what do you think surprised you most about how participants responded or the decisions they made during the exercise?
00:30:01
Tracy Levett-Jones
I guess I was surprised how engaged they were because it was an experiment. And when we did the original interviews with the nurse and midwives, we didn't actually plan to create a simulation. That was just, you know, an idea that came out of it. And like many simulations, you say, I've got an idea. We didn't know how to go. So I was surprised irrespective of where we have this simulation, with undergraduate students, in workshops with different healthcare professionals, they all get completely engaged. So that was a delightful surprise. But the other surprise, I think, was just how much they know. I think that was a surprise for them as well, that when you bring a group of people together that are willing to drop their...
00:30:52
Tracy Levett-Jones
professional boundaries and work together how much they know. For the simulation we provided some prompts and you know a few example answers because we thought they might get stuck we didn't need them because what they do is call upon or harness their experiences their knowledge and their willingness to take a risk and make suggestions So being in a workshop or in one of these simulations, I always learn so much because people know lot.
00:31:39
Tracy Levett-Jones
thinking, lateral thinking, whatever you call it, but that comes to the foreground. And it's an absolute delight for us and for them. to say we actually, if we were in this situation, could be of some use.
00:31:52
Tracy Levett-Jones
And they certainly could.
00:31:55
Melanie Barlow
Fantastic. Okay. Thanks so much, Tracy. Yeah, you've got me thinking. And anyone, I guess, listening to this who may be thinking like me, I want to give that a go. sounds so interesting.
00:32:12
Melanie Barlow
What advice would you give them? Like how to get started? Is there any lessons learnt?
00:32:18
Tracy Levett-Jones
Amel, do you mean in terms of creating tabletop simulation?
00:32:22
Melanie Barlow
Yeah.
00:32:23
Tracy Levett-Jones
Yeah.
00:32:26
Tracy Levett-Jones
I always say when comes to simulation, first of all, have a go. Just have a go.
00:32:31
Melanie Barlow
Yeah.
00:32:33
Tracy Levett-Jones
Then you might need to step back and, you know, be more thoughtful and re-evaluate and use co-design principles with different people, but sometimes with simulation got to jump out and say, let's give this a go. Let's give this a grow with a small group and get feedback. So I think creating a tabletop simulation, I think authenticity is the key.
00:32:56
Tracy Levett-Jones
You've got to be able to say this is real, this matters, it's drawn from real experience. But because you don't need a huge amount of equipment or resources, it's very doable, obviously very cost effective.
Managing Emotional Triggers and Psychological Safety
00:33:11
Tracy Levett-Jones
I think it's important, I said previously that they're not tested on the outcomes from the simulation, but we have created assessment items that educators can use, but we want that to be very separate from the tabletop simulation because we want that to be an experimental, free-flowing event.
00:33:34
Tracy Levett-Jones
But I think have a go, look at the tabletop simulation literature, focus on authenticity,
00:33:43
Tracy Levett-Jones
and evaluate, always evaluate and say, did it make a difference?
00:33:44
Melanie Barlow
Yeah.
00:33:50
Melanie Barlow
Thank you. Do you think there's a risk? I'm just thinking of people who are new to tabletop and relatively new to simulation who may not have had like professional development in simulation may just want try a tabletop in the classroom or something.
00:34:07
Melanie Barlow
there a way to, you know, and think that there's no risk involved? is like, how ensure, you know, that those principles of simulation, like psychological safety and those kinds of things also apply when people think it's this, oh, it's just a tabletop or, you know, you understand?
00:34:21
Tracy Levett-Jones
Yeah.
00:34:27
Tracy Levett-Jones
Yeah.
00:34:28
Melanie Barlow
Yeah.
00:34:29
Melanie Barlow
Yeah.
00:34:29
Tracy Levett-Jones
Yeah.
00:34:30
Tracy Levett-Jones
It is really important. Because even something that we think is deceptively simple, like a tabletop simulation, has an element of risk.
00:34:42
Tracy Levett-Jones
I think most simulations, if not all, have an element of risk. And they can, if it's not managed carefully, cause distress. I don't think stress is bad at all.
00:34:54
Tracy Levett-Jones
I think stress heightens the learning experience. And we don't want you stress where there's no stress at all. We certainly don't want distress. So I think it's really important that students know, particularly in tabletop simulations,
00:35:10
Tracy Levett-Jones
that they can make mistakes. It's an opportunity to learn. one's going have all the answers here.
00:35:23
Tracy Levett-Jones
They need to know it's real and that can cause a level of stress, but they have to know that they're moving towards gaining some skills, some understanding, some knowledge, and that's what it's about.
00:35:37
Tracy Levett-Jones
It's not, as I said before, not creating disaster nurses. It's just giving them an opportunity to think differently, think more broadly, and to reflect on their contribution to addressing climate change.
00:35:52
Melanie Barlow
Mm-hmm.
00:35:53
Tracy Levett-Jones
But there is a risk of distress, and I think it's very much the educator, the facilitator, the facilitator creating the boundaries and saying, you we're in this together.
00:36:07
Tracy Levett-Jones
And that's why there's lots of prompts and lots of model answers if the facilitator needs it if the facilitator thinks it's going off course and they want to focus on the learning outcomes because like all simulations, you still need to have clear learning outcomes to guide the learner or the participant so that it's not getting outside of the safety boundary.
00:36:35
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
I just want to add to that too, Tracy, I guess that's really important when, and I love the fact that you're using authenticity, that these are based on real stories.
00:36:35
Melanie Barlow
Yeah, before hand back to Carrie, I think that. Yeah.
00:36:47
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Perhaps also there needs to be some level of caution with those facilitators when they're designing up a simulation based on a real event where we know from the media, that the events of that have been devastating. And I use the Victorian bushfires, for example.
00:37:05
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
We'd probably steer away from things where there's perhaps, you know, lot of questions asked, why wasn't this done? When students might come into a simulation and they come up with all of these ideas and think, this would be the ideal, but what happened? And then there's the why.
00:37:24
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
And then there's the trigger of grief and that, So I guess one of the things that's great that they're authentic, and I know just sidestepping the simulation that often coroner's cases where they can be real triggers for participants, particularly if they've been associated with that particular event.
00:37:46
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
So I guess there comes a caution with any simulation that we're designing, isn't it, that who have we got in our audience? What sort of emotional triggers are these going to create for them?
00:37:59
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
And the authenticity is absolutely important, but we also have to wear caution as facilitators. Yeah.
00:38:07
Melanie Barlow
Yeah, I loved what Tracy said around. Yeah, I loved what you said around, you know, we're after stress, not de-stress.
00:38:07
Tracy Levett-Jones
Yeah, that's a very wise observation.
00:38:16
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Yeah.
00:38:16
Tracy Levett-Jones
Yeah.
00:38:17
Melanie Barlow
That's a really good line, isn't it?
00:38:20
Tracy Levett-Jones
It is.
00:38:20
Melanie Barlow
Because there's always stress present in what we do.
00:38:20
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Yeah.
00:38:20
Tracy Levett-Jones
And there have been times where
00:38:23
Tracy Levett-Jones
we've said to students, well, we brought it up and students have said, I don't want to be in the bushfire one. I'm saying, absolutely fine. Would you like to be in the thunderstorm asthma?
00:38:37
Tracy Levett-Jones
So we give students the opportunity. They're allocated to groups, but we give the students the opportunity to say, that one's not for me. So that they know. And they don't have to explain why.
00:38:49
Jenny
Tracy, I'm curious, you talked about the groups. Is there a minimum number, a maximum number? How did you sort of work out what the size of these interdisciplinary groups might be?
00:39:01
Tracy Levett-Jones
We looked at, and they're not always interdisciplinary, often they're just one group of nursing, well, nursing students in a tutorial group, for example, which is generally 30 students and six groups, four or five students. We've done it in conferences where there's been much bigger groups. So there's no fixed number. But generally we want the number to allow for free-flowing discussion and everyone's voices to be heard.
00:39:28
Tracy Levett-Jones
So, know, I've done it with groups of 10. And as long as they are all involved, it still works. But it also works with, you know, three. found two...
00:39:41
Tracy Levett-Jones
two or three, they may not have the combined experiences that allows for the richest type of discussion. Certainly has discussion, but I think if you get a good size group, you know, four or five, you know, six, then the diversity of their previous experiences allows for much more richness in the learning opportunities.
00:40:05
Jenny
Thank you for sharing that. Any other questions, girls, for Tracey while we've got her here with our captive audience?
00:40:15
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Unfortunately, I think our time is up and I
Conclusion and Gratitude
00:40:17
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
wish we could just keep talking. So I think there's just really the golden question at the end. Over to you, Jen.
00:40:23
Melanie Barlow
Okay.
00:40:24
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
You're the usual to ask that question.
00:40:27
Jenny
So, Tracy, our most favourite question is if you could be anywhere in the world having a drink, where would you be and what might you be sipping on?
00:40:38
Tracy Levett-Jones
I love that question. So I am Jewel National, so I'm going to be cheeky and say there's two places and I'll tell you really quickly. I'm from the UK, so I was born there and one of my daughters lived there. So being in an English pub in a village where she lives and having mulled wine, looking outside the snow or the countryside, it's just beautiful. But I've lived in Australia for a long, long time and been camping down the south coast at place called Mary Beach, where there's nothing except beach and bush, no reception of any type, and sitting on the beach. You know, we're very fortunate we've been going so long at this caravan park. As people die, you move more closer to the beach. So now we've got, you know, prime spot. We're right on the beach with kangaroos and the sunset,
00:41:29
Tracy Levett-Jones
It's beautiful. And you know what, Jenny, I'll probably drink anything there. But just sitting there, you know, with my kids and my best friends been going for years and children and grandchildren, you know, looking very feral because, you know, the cold water showers and it's not much else.
00:41:48
Tracy Levett-Jones
My idea of heaven.
00:41:50
Melanie Barlow
Sounds so good.
00:41:52
Jenny
Yes, paint.
00:41:52
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
Tracy, what can we say? Thank you so much for your time today. I'm sure learners are just making notes and thinking about how they can implement simulation that has such potential impact and a realisation that this is the sort of content that we need to be preparing our learners for.
00:42:15
Kerry Anne ReidSearl
just love what you've done. And again, Tracy, thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for your time. It's always a joy being around you. Thanks.
00:42:25
Tracy Levett-Jones
Thank you all. It's been an absolute pleasure.
00:42:28
Melanie Barlow
Thank you, Tracy.
00:42:29
Jenny
Thank you.