A guide to novel instructors in Emergo Train System®

Sammanfattning: Swedish law states that county councils and municipalities need to prepare for crisis and receive training in crisis management. As crises are infrequent events, training must be conducted on potential scenarios. Scenarios can be simulated using the Emergo Train System (ETS). ETS is a low fidelity educational simulation-tool that tests and educates care personnel in crisis management. The tool is communicative, cooperative and challenges participants in handling sufficient resources during a crisis or major incident. Planning, facilitation, and evaluation is done by an ETS-instructor. To become an ETS-instructor one must take a three-day course at an ETS-faculty. Previous research proposed that novel Senior instructors need additional support in managing exercises. To explore this further this project’s aim is to explore and deepen current knowledge about ETS-instructors, their work, and design a manual for novel instructors. Information about instructor work was gathered through semi-structured interviews. Seven interviews were conducted with novel and experienced instructors. During interviews the participants were asked about their work process and actors involved in conducting exercises. Additionally, the interviewer and the participants constructed a journey map and an actor’s map together. The gathered data was analysed through reflexive thematic analysis (TA) described by Braun and Clarke (2022) and the seven actor’s maps and journey maps were merged into summarised maps. Five themes were gathered from the thematic analysis: Roles, Realism, Defining purpose and goals, Learning, and Planning and acting. The theme Roles included Other instructors, Participants, Exercise leaders, Colleagues, and Evaluator which were defined as more involved in managing an exercise than other roles. Instructors gather information about participants to increase realism, such as participant profession, workplace, and geographical surroundings. Purpose and goal should be clear and contemplated thoroughly together with customer. The instructors adjust their exercises to suit participant level of knowledge and the instructors recommend prioritising feedback given to the participants and to always give positive feedback at the end of the exercise. It is beneficial for learning to create a safe learning environment, where the participants feel they can act, make mistakes, and self-reflect. The instructor plan realistic and purposeful injects in an action schedule along with their scenario planning. Injects can also be improvised to aid participants or to keep them within the frames of the scenario. The instructors act as different pre-planned roles that are required in the scenario, but that the participants cannot take themselves. The study discusses contradictions in the results about how different terms should be defined and how the results were incorporated into the manual. Contributions of this study are the mapping of actors and the instructor’s work process as earlier visualisation of the ETS-instructors work process has been made. The greatest contributions were (1) the support of defining goals, purpose, and indicators (2) the immense considerations during scenario planning regarding realism, and (3) the proficient conduct of managing complex situations during exercise.