Quickcals software package

A de-identified numbered list of nursing and medical student numbers was obtained from the School of Nursing and Midwifery and the School of Medicine. The lists comprised 109 third year nursing and 201 final year medical students scheduled to complete an interdisciplinary ISBAR training programme as part of the university undergraduate curriculum in September 2016. Randomisation was stratified by discipline and was conducted using a computer-generated programme (GraphPad QuickCals software package, www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/) as a two-stage process (figure 1).
First, n=45 nursing and n=45 medical students were randomly selected using the programme. These 90 students were then randomly allocated by discipline using the same computer programme to one of the three training groups: E, E+S and E+PBP. Subjects were excluded from the study if (1) a certificate of successful completion (within the previous 4 weeks) of the NEWS e-learning education programme was not presented on the day of training and (2) lack of consent.

Subjects from final year medicine in UCC, Ireland were excluded from the study if they had undergone previous EWS/ISBAR training. One hundred twenty students from final year medicine in UCC, Ireland were randomly chosen by a computer-generated program (GraphPad QuickCals software package, www. graphpad.com/ quickcalcs/) using a de-identified numbered list of remaining eligible medical students, obtained from the School of Medicine. The computer-generated program also categorised them randomly into one of three groups: (HSE), (PBP) and (S). The participants were not informed of the group to which they were allocated. Subjects were excluded from the study if (1) they had undergone previous EWS/ISBAR training, (2) did not consent to the study, (3) missed a simulation session or (4) did not complete their assigned e-learning courses prior to the second simulation session. This resulted in 45 students being excluded from trial involvement from the outset and 6 students being excluded during the trial (figure 2).