Enhancing emergency medical education and training: Performance under pressure

Continuous development of professional skills is particularly relevant for emergency physicians because of the daily stress and high-pressure working conditions they face. Nevertheless, workshops that provide practical exercises for better handling these working conditions, especially for emergency physicians, are rare. The present workshop was designed as a part of a pilot project with a blended-learning approach. It lasted for 10 hours and took place over 1.5 days. Twenty-five emergency physicians took part: 22 from anesthesia and one participant each from trauma surgery, general surgery, and radiology. Both before and after the workshop, the participants were asked to assess and describe their experiences with this and similar workshops. The pre-workshop survey revealed that all the emergency physicians had already been in situations with high psychological pressure. They rated the psychological stress as correspondingly high. According to the participants, improving their ability to deal with stress could enhance their work performance as emergency physicians. The results of the post-workshop survey indicate that the participants felt that they had benefited from the workshop and the techniques they had learned for coping with psychological pressure in emergency situations and were able to apply these in clinical practice. This and comparable teaching formats for managing the stress of emergency physicians may prove beneficial.