Clinical Event Debriefing or “hot debriefing” is a guided learning conversation after a clinical event, with the goal of closing the gap between understanding and experience. The primary goal of clinical event debriefing is to improve patient safety and future clinical practice. There is also evidence that clinical event debriefing improves the well-being of healthcare workers.
Dr Kerrianne Huynh, one of our Monash Health intensivists and simulation instructors, derived the concept for the Clinical Event Debriefing Course from years of reflection and experience in clinical medicine. She noted that incidents such as cardiac arrest on the ward could lead to significant distress in staff. A survey of Monash Health ICU staff showed a significant number wanted to perform clinical debriefing but hesitated to do so due to lack of formal training. Thus began the development of the Clinical Event Debriefing Course at Monash Health.
Dr Huynh attended the Healthcare Simulation Essentials: Design and Debriefing Course by the Centre of Medical Simulation in Boston, Massachusetts, USA with this concept in mind, and further developed and refined details of a lesson plan with Drs Lon Setnik and Jenny Rudolph. Dr Lon Setnik is the Associate Director of Clinical Programs at the Centre of Medical Simulation. Dr Jenny Rudolph is the Senior Director of Innovation at the Centre of Medical Simulation and her seminal paper on debriefing with good judgement continues to be fundamental to simulation debriefing today.
In response to feedback received on this course, Dr Huynh developed the Monash Health CLEAR debriefing tool, designed to provide an easy pocket guide for facilitators of debriefing to structure their learning conversations.
The team at Monash Simulation developed the Clinical Event Debriefing Course, with the inaugural course running in February 2025 at the Victorian Heart Institute, Victoria Heart Hospital. The course involved facilitated discussion regarding the purpose of clinical event debriefing and some of the pitfalls and problems that may arise in these situations. Participants were introduced to the CLEAR debriefing tool, followed by immersive scenarios with Monash Simulation as embedded faculty.
Here is a written testimonial from one of the course participants:
“I thoroughly enjoyed the day and got a lot of useful tools to apply to my practice. I think this course is extremely beneficial to anyone who runs debriefing and just the explanations and conceptualisation of the process was fantastic. I have definitely learnt a lot.”
The ongoing collaboration between Monash Simulation and the Monash Intensive Care network demonstrates the agility of the Monash Simulation team to respond to the learning needs of the Monash network, with the goals of patient safety and healthcare worker well-being in mind.
Please click on this link to register for the course https://www.trybooking.com/CWYGF
Please reach out to the Monash Simulation team at monashsimulation@monashhealth.org to explore partnership opportunities or navigate to our website https://monashhealth.org/services/simulation/ for more information.
Dr Kerrianne Huynh – Intensive Care Consultant, Simulation Instructor and Simulation Intensivist for the Monash Network