SAFEE: A Debriefing Tool to Identify Latent Conditions in Simulation-based Hospital Design Testing

In the process of hospital planning and design, the ability to mitigate risk is imperative and practical as design decisions made early can lead to unintended downstream effects that may lead to patient harm. Simulation has been applied as a strategy to identify system gaps and safety threats with the goal to mitigate risk and improve patient outcomes. Early in the pre-construction phase of design development for a new free-standing children’s hospital, Simulation-based Hospital Design Testing (SbHDT) was conducted in a full-scale mock-up. This allowed healthcare teams and architects to actively witness care providing an avenue to study the interaction of humans with their environment, enabling effectively identification of latent conditions that may lay dormant in proposed design features. In order to successfully identify latent conditions in the physical environment and understand the impact of those latent conditions, a specific debriefing framework focused on the built environment was developed and implemented. This article provides a rationale for an approach to debriefing that specifically focuses on the built environment and describes SAFEE, a debriefing guide for simulationists looking to conduct SbHDT.