Assessment of newborn resuscitation skills of physicians with a simulator manikin

Objective Education of medical staff according to Neonatal Resuscitation Program guidelines improves outcome of delivery room resuscitation. Regular assessment of skills is important for reliable performance of neonatal resuscitation. We assessed the practical resuscitation skills of clinicians in a standard scenario in a newborn simulation.

Design Observational cohort study.

Main outcome measures The resuscitation skills of 6 consultant neonatologists, 11 paediatricians and 11 anaesthesiologists were assessed in a simulation. The standard test scenario was a newborn infant with asphyxia. A 30-item checklist was used for scoring technical skills, while non-technical skills were scored using a nine-item checklist. The pass/fail score was 18.66 for technical skills. Scoring was carried out by a neonatologist/anaesthesiologist team in real time.

Results Two paediatricians and two anaesthesiologists failed the test. The average score was 25 for neonatologists, 22 for paediatricians and 20 for anaesthesiologists. Technical scores were compiled into four clusters for assessment of items in the same category. The scores in the ventilation cluster were lower the later the participants started ventilation, the longer they maintained pauses in ventilation, the older the baby at the time of intubation and the longer the time they used for intubation. The time intervals were checked from the video recordings. The neonatologists had better non-technical skills than the other groups. Good group-working skills correlated with high technical scores.

Conclusions Many clinicians exhibited inadequate skills to resuscitate a newborn infant in a standard scenario. The neonatologists, as clinical experts, performed best in both technical and non-technical skills testing.