Captivating debrief - how it made me feel, made me engaged and improved my self-efficacy
Authors: Espegren Olga 
Published: January 2024

Introduction: The world is facing an enormous demographic challenge. Soon, we must provide health services to twice as many people with todays’ staffing. A global survey shows that only 15% of the workforce are actively engaged at work (1).  Organizations with ""thriving employees"" perform better (2). Self-efficacy is central to retaining personnel.  Can capacity in the healthcare be increased by releasing more commitment and self-efficacy in the individual, and increased performance in teams? The aim of this qualitative, multi-method study was to explore what facilitators perceive to be present when they experience extraordinary simulation-based learning (SBL) in a municipal health-care setting.

Method: Exploration of what brings a debrief to life through 7 semi-structured individual interviews of fasilitators og SBL, 2 focus group-interviews logs and physical workshop with "story cards" based on findings in the individual interviews. Research-design with inductive exploratory approach chosen to get in-depth narratives of SBL the participants remembered extra well.

Results & discussion: The findings of the study are discussed in relation to the learning loop (3), the progress principle (4), high-quality connections (HQC) (5) and broaden-and-build theory (6). After analyzing the texts and achieving inter-author agreement, we found four main themes. Firstly, topic relevance for debriefings to “give goosebumps“. The topic must matter to the participants, either personally or to perform better, individually or as team. Secondly, the presence of psychological safety and "good feelings" were important. It is of great importance that the participants feel that it is safe to train, to create an atmosphere for learning, not assessment. Also, being able to frame the group to reduce participants’ fear of making a fool of themselves. Flourishing debriefings occur more in groups that feel safe, have good atmosphere, are having fun and want to return for more training.

Another theme was to give room for ventilation if strong emotions are evoked, but care not to release the entire energy in the room. The last theme found was co-creating new solutions by discovering new insights through reflection. That is what makes you feel alive as facilitator and participant!

Empirical evidence from the study may suggest that regular SBL, of high quality, in the workplace can breathe life into a working environment, thus providing a stepping-stone to better psychological safety at work and hence better patient safety (7). It can also help employees "flourish" in their jobs. Flourishing workplaces may improve capacity but must be studied further.

Keywords: debrief, positive emotions, meaning, relevance, psychological safety, co-creating

References:

(1)(SMBNorge, 2019, February 7)

(2) Dutton, J. (2003). Breathing life into organizational studies. Journal of management inquiry, Vol 12. (1), s.5-19.

(3)Hansen, M. (2018). Great at Work. Simon & Schuster Ltd. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bilibrary/detail.action?docID=5680621

(4)Amabile, T., & Kramer, S. (2011). The Progress Principle. Boston: Harvard Business Review.

(5)Dutton, J. (2003). Fostering High-Quality Connections. Stanford social innovation review. p. 54-57.

(6)Fredrickson, B. (2013). Positive emotions broaden and build. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 47, s. 1-53.

(7)Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization.