Our journey into cognitive aid innovation..
Recognising our own vulnerabilities in times of overwhelming clinical stress, we set out to explore the various cognitive aids in existence for anaesthesia.
We agreed our starting point would be Neuro-anaesthesia and envisioned a Neuro-anaesthesia Crisis Manual in collaboration with our Neuro-anaesthetists for the benefit of our whole department.
We searched far and wide but kept coming back to EMIC. We were just blown away by their approach and the resources they made available to help people in our position.
We actually utilised many of the resources they offer and found it incredibly useful to structure our approaches.
We spoke to the Human Factors experts and our anticipated end-users. This helped us to refine our own style and innovation, eventually deciding on a text-graphic balance to cognitively unload.
We will always be grateful to EMIC.
Anyone with an interest in cognitive aids/emergency manuals would benefit from the work of the Stanford Cognitive Aid Group, Ariadne Labs and Emergency Manual Implementation Collaborative (EMIC)
The EMIC website is an invaluable resource filled with free tools and multi-media material on emergency manuals/cognitive aids.
With videos, articles, tutorials and design templates, the site guides institutions through evidence-based approach to introduce emergency manuals from engaging your team through design/development, implementation and tips on how to review and maximise success through quality assurance and testing.
The implementation toolkit can be found here www.implementingemergencychecklists.org/implementing-the-checklist/getting-started/
It also includes landmark papers exploring how checklists and cognitive aids were transitioned from aviation into medicine, ultimately improving team performance and patient safety around the world.
Provided within are examples of subspecialty manuals in areas such as Neuro-anaesthesia, Paediatric Anaesthesia and Obstetrics from around the world.
While the focus is on perioperative care, there is cross over to other areas of high-acuity medicine.
For anyone interested in how cognitive aids can help your institution and for an easy place to start developing your own, EMIC website is a one-stop shop.
Highly recommended, enjoy exploring https://www.emergencymanuals.org/
