Funding outcome

Approximately one in ten babies needs help to breathe at birth. Helping babies breathe is called neonatal resuscitation. Healthcare providers must perform many tasks quickly and correctly--using expert knowledge and decision-making skills--to help their newborn patients breathe. Neonatal resuscitation can be complex and stressful, and medical errors remain common (in up to 60% of cases). To best prepare healthcare providers to help babies breathe, simulation training is recommended. Simulation allows healthcare providers to practice their knowledge and skills in a realistic yet low stakes learning environment, and can be used for both training and assessment. Traditional simulation requires healthcare providers to come to a lab, often as a team, where they use special equipment to practice neonatal resuscitation together. An instructor is also needed to run the scenario and to give feedback to learners. Ordinarily, these high resource demands pose barriers for frequent simulation training. However, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, current efforts to conserve medical resources as well as maintain social distancing has made traditional simulation even more inaccessible. Therefore, there have been major interruptions to the education, assessment, and certification of learners such as medical students, who have been sent home as non-essential staff. This overwhelmed system leaves healthcare providers dangerously underprepared. We need an alternative approach to simulation which allows for remote learning and assessment of healthcare providers. Simulation-based serious games may offer a solution. Serious games use competition and emotional design to teach players important knowledge or skills. The serious game RETAIN allows learners to practice simulated neonatal resuscitation scenarios on their computer (or other device) any time and any place which is convenient for them. In RETAIN, players use virtual equipment and actions to help a simulated baby breathe. During the scenario, players receive feedback based on how well they are doing (i.e., performing the correct actions in the correct order). There are scenarios of different difficulty-levels, and all of the scenarios are based on real life cases recorded at a level-three hospital. The purpose of my research is to investigate if training with RETAIN improves healthcare providers' knowledge and skills of neonatal resuscitation. Also, I will examine if healthcare providers' performance on RETAIN can be used to assess their neonatal resuscitation knowledge and skills. New approaches to effectively maintain remote training and assessment of healthcare providers during COVID-19 social-distancing will ensure that our smallest patients and their families continue to receive the best care possible during these unprecedented times and beyond.