Gamification of a Low-Fidelity Paper Doll to Teach Primary Survey to Pediatric Residents

Cureus. 2023 Jul 17;15(7):e41996. doi: 10.7759/cureus.41996. eCollection 2023 Jul.

Abstract

When critically ill pediatric patients arrive in the emergency department (ED), a rapid physical evaluation is performed in order to systematically evaluate and address life-threatening conditions. This is commonly referred to as the primary survey. At our institution, pediatric residents are frequently tasked with this role, but they have limited training for or experience with this task. Quality improvement review of real resuscitation recordings at our institution revealed delays in initiation and incomplete primary surveys. We sought to utilize gamification to standardize and optimize reproducible training for the primary survey task for pediatric residents using a low-fidelity paper doll model simulation to improve primary survey performance in actual resuscitations.

Keywords: emergency med; low resource; pediatrics; simulation; skills and simulation training.