Performance Psychology in Medicine symposium hosted by London's Air Ambulance

For years gone by, pre-hospital care has looked to the aviation industry for a model to fix the inconvenient challenge that faces all specialities of medicine – human factors. But change is afoot as medicine opens its eyes to not just industries, but those individuals who can produce elite performance under extreme pressure.

The Performance in Psychology Medicine symposium hosted by London's Air Ambulance at the Blizzard Institute on the 24th June embraced this challenge, as a packed schedule aimed to impart lessons from top comedians, Olympians, sports psychologists and some of the leading names in pre-hospital, emergency and critical care. Everyone present agreed it was a conference like no other.

The day started with Cliff Reid asking why clinicians should care about performance, and highlighted how the Greater Sydney Area Helicopter Emergency Medical Service (HEMS) had managed to create a climate of elite performance in a world-renowned service. The approach was multi-faceted – direct involvement of senior clinicians in the training, a rigorously structured induction and a culture that every tasking should produce an elite performance. He went on to highlight his service's ‘zero-point survey’, a process that is performed prior to the primary survey but can be at multiple points throughout the incident in order to focus the team at crucial points of the job cycle. He highlighted the point of tasking, on route to the job and approaching the patient side as crucial times to do this in order to incorporate a check of Self, Team, Environment and Patient. To me, it raised an important point in our practice. When tasked to a critical incident where you know your knowledge is going to be stretched, do we as a profession have a model or structure to ensure we are mentally prepared? I have seen experienced clinicians do this very well. Could such a model help focus our students or more junior clinicians when facing such pressure?