Improvement and Evaluation of Emergency Trauma Management Using Interactive Simulation

Trauma injuries are one of the main leading causes of death in the world. Therefore, specific trauma training using web-based technology presents a solid simulation modality to create and train realistic trauma scenarios. Medical students and residents were enrolled to train trauma management cases over a 2-weeks period with a web-based simulator. Sixteen different trauma scenarios were created, four of them were used as exams (pre-training) and the remaining twelve cases were used to train during the 2-weeks period. After the training period, the four exam cases were repeated (post-training) and different metrics were analyzed before and after the training to study the trauma management improvement. The actions taken by the participants along the initial four minutes, the minimum actions to perform and the whole simulation were analyzed. The results obtained show improvements on all the trauma scenarios showing significance (p-value < 0.05) after training. Statistical significance was achieved for the score indicating improvements on the correct actions executed by trainees, as well as for avoiding actions that do not contribute positively to patient recovery. Web-based simulation contributes to emergency trauma management learning, and it allows objectively evaluating the learning process.