Background: Increasingly, medical students are being taught acute medicine using whole-body simulator manikins.
Aim: We aimed to design, validate and make widely available two simple assessment tools to be used with Laerdal SimMan (R) for final year students.
Methods: We designed two scenarios with criterion-based checklists focused on assessment and management of two medical emergencies. Members of faculty critiqued the assessments for face validity and checklists revised. We assessed three groups of different experience levels: Foundation Year 2 doctors, third and final year medical students. Differences between groups were analysed, and internal consistency and interrater reliability calculated. A generalisability analysis was conducted using scenario and rater as facets in design.
Results: A maximum of two items were removed from either checklist following the initial survey. Significantly different scores for three groups of experience for both scenarios were reported (p0.90). Internal consistency was poor (alpha<50.5). Generalizability study results suggest that four cases would provide reliable discrimination between final year students.
Conclusions: These assessments proved easy to administer and we have gone some way to demonstrating construct validity and reliability. We have made the material available on a simulator website to enable others to reproduce these assessments
