Johan Creutzfeldt

*Team work in acute care situations. Training in medical full-scale simulators and virtual worlds.*
High quality team work in acute medical situations is of great importance to achieve good outcome. Conditions for and perceptions of good teamwork is studied as well as actue team situations from a patient involvement situation. Further, teams that are dispersed by physical distance have been studied and compared to "standard" team work situations, quantitavely and qualitatively.

Simulator based training is within medicine an accepted mode for increased efficacy and safety. Good results have been shown when simulator training has been used for delivering technical and non-technical skills as well as teamwork skills. An important component of the training is the feed-back (or debriefing) and the active reflection then taking place. Still much knowledge is lacking when it comes to how to effectively use simulator based training. Since full-scale simulator training also is resource intense and costly,  there is a demand for other training methods employing simulation. One such method is computer-based training in virtual worlds. Taking advantage of the skills of the digital native generation, virtual world based training has the potentials of big variability in content and context and lower costs. However, today there are few studies within medicine of the use of virtual worlds for learning and training. Using quantitative, psychometric, and qualitative methodologies, training
effects among trainees and groups are studied. Motivation, concentration and attentions, as well as mental strain is studied along with indicators of
self-efficacy and effect of non-technical skills and medical outcome.

The research group is multi-disciplinary and the studies are carried out at the  Center for Advanced Medical Simulation and Training (CAMST) at the Karolinska University Hospital and Karolinska Institutet.