The Clinical Skills Center of King Abdulaziz University (KAU) held the Western Region's first Anesthesia Crisis Resource Management (CRM) Course for anesthesiologists in this city on Feb. 23. The workshop was attended by anesthesiology doctors and technicians from KAU Hospital and other hospitals like Al Mashfa Hospital. The workshop aimed to introduce principles of human performance analysis and the improvement of technique in order for individual health practitioners and healthcare teams as a whole to better deal with health crises. These aims were achieved with the scenarios conducted. Dr. Abdulaziz Boker, KAU associate professor, and Dr. Abeer Arab, KAU assistant professor and deputy director, were lead facilitators of the workshop. “Crisis resource management has been widely used for years in many high-risk industries like aviation, nuclear power plants and space operations and this workshop marks the first application of such technology in the region,” Dr. Boker said. Dr. Arab said that the combination of techniques and technologies — together with advanced and specialized audiovisual presentations and mannequin technology available at the Center — has become very useful in making such training on human factors for patient safety more engaging. Dr. Boker also said that over the last few years, the American Board of Anesthesiologists has introduced and implemented policies to integrate the use of CRM techniques for anesthesiologist recertification. Through this workshop, anesthesiologists were given an opportunity to test their clinical judgment through various scenarios and develop a better decision-making process, ultimately yielding safer clinical practices. The doctors are very optimistic that in the next few years, CRM will be more widespread in the Middle East, thus improving healthcare practices among individuals and healthcare teams while focusing on effective communication and the teamwork approach to improve patient safety initiatives. Dr. Boker and Dr. Arab supervised the workshop with the help of Dr. Mohammad Daghistani, consultant and chairman of the Anesthesiology Department of King Abdulaziz Medical City-NGHA; Dr. Mohammad Nasser, consultant and chairman of the Anesthesiology Department of King Fahd General Hospital; and Dr. Wadeeah Bahaziq, consultant at KAUH. __
