Too stressed to think? A scoping review of the literature for healthcare educators utilising high acuity clinical scenarios

Background: The practise of paramedicine can be highly stressful particularly where urgent lifesaving decisions need to be made. Traditionally, educators have adopted the approach of placing students in simulated stressful situations as a way of learning to cope with these challenges. It is unclear from the literature whether traditional stress inoculation enhances or hinders learning. This scoping review aims to identify and examine both the peer-reviewed and grey literature reporting physiological stress responses to high-acuity scenarios in paramedicine and cognate healthcare disciplines.

Methods: Adhering strictly to JBI Evidence Synthesis Manual for conducting a scoping review, medical subject headings and areas, keywords and all other possible index terms were searched across EBSCOhost (Medline, CINAHL and APA PsycInfo), Scopus and, PubMed. English language articles both published (peer-reviewed academic papers, reports and conference proceedings) and unpublished (grey literature, Google Scholar reports) were included, and publications citing retrieved articles were also checked.

Results: Searches performed across five electronic databases identified 52 articles where abstracts indicated potential inclusion. From this, 22 articles which reported physiological or psychophysiological responses to stressful scenario-based education were included.

Conclusion: This review identified that an acceptable level of stress during simulation can be beneficial, however a point can be exceeded where stress becomes a hinderance to learning resulting in underperformance. By identifying strategies to moderate the impact of acute stress, educators of paramedic and other healthcare students can utilise high-acuity clinical scenarios to their andragogical armamentarium which has the potential to improve real-world clinical outcomes.