Anaesthetics education

A modified Delphi process to seek consensus from secondary care anaesthetists on maintaining clinical skills to manage acutely deteriorating children

Introduction

Managing acutely sick and deteriorating children is an expected part of the workload of secondary care anaesthetists and/or intensive care doctors¹. Managing the critically ill child will be an infrequent event for most secondary care anaesthetists, whose focus of practice is likely to be adult medicine. The North Thames Paediatric Network (NTPN) would like to explore this further by seeking the views of experienced consultant anaesthetists and intensivists who manage deteriorating children.

Methodology

We have selected the Delphi methodology as a choice of study to investigate this further because this is the style of data collection best suited to situations where there is a lack of published evidence available. The Delphi process is a structured method of developing consensus amongst a panel of experts, which can then inform the creation of a standardised model. Our aim is to gain consensus on three domains related to learning: knowledge, skills, and experience.

There will be three rounds to this process. Round 1 involves an initial Teams meeting with our selected experts, followed by completion of the below survey. Results will then be collated, summarised and circulated as a series of statements (Round 2) to the same experts, who then review and score each statement via a Likert scale depending on the strength of their agreement. Round 3 involves the anonymised results from Round 2 being sent out to the experts who are then given the option to revise their opinion before final responses are analysed.

Selection criteria for panellists: lead role in paediatric anaesthesia/critical care in secondary care hospitals receiving acute paediatrics in North Thames and East of England regions.

Panellist responses via Google Forms will be anonymous to the researcher.

Responses will be developed into statements and fed back to participants.

Strength of agreement will be voted on using a Likert scale 1-4 and responses will be presented to panellists with data that may include central tendencies, percentage, dispersion and frequency of distribution.

There may be subsequent re-iteration of statements and panellists will be able to revise their views.

70% engagement is required.

Consensus will defined as 67% agreement, representing 2 standard deviations.

This has been designed as a 3 round process and therefore is not designed to test stability of responses between rounds.