(1090) Implementation of Educational Telerounding Program During the Conflict in Ukraine: A Pilot Study

Introduction: Our group implemented a multimodal, longitudinal knowledge-sharing platform offering trauma critical care education to critical care clinicians practicing during the ongoing conflict in Ukraine in April 2022. To reinforce adherence to best daily critical care practices, we extended our program to incorporate educational telerounding sessions utilizing a systematic, evidence-based approach to intensive care unit rounding. The aim of this study is to describe the development and implementation of this pilot telerounding program in the ICU of an academic hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Methods: Weekly educational telerounding sessions were held by an interprofessional faculty of 13 critical care and emergency medicine clinicians practicing in the US, 5 of whom were bilingual in English and Ukrainian. Each week, one challenging patient identified by the Kyiv ICU team was discussed using either a telehealth video platform (Teladoc™) or a video conferencing platform (Zoom™), in addition to a private group chat in a messaging app with videocall features (Viber™). The Checklist for Early Recognition and Treatment of Acute Illness and iNjury (CERTAIN) rounding checklist was used to guide case presentations. At the end of each session, a case summary including recommendations from the US faculty translated into Ukrainian was posted in the group chat. Ukrainian ICU team feedback was gathered through semi-structured interviews.

Results: Fifteen telerounding sessions were conducted between February to July 2023. On average, 7 US faculty and 2 Ukrainian intensivists joined each session. The Ukrainian ICU team highlighted 3 main program benefits: improved adherence to best practices due to checklist use, enhanced quality of patient communication, and the efficiencies gained by discussing cases in Ukrainian. The main barriers included unreliable internet connections and implementation challenges due to limited healthcare worker time and support.

Conclusions: Our experience suggests that conducting educational telerounding sessions using readily available video communication platforms to foster best practices in trauma critical care during an ongoing armed conflict is feasible and offers benefits. Additional research is needed to clarify current implementation barriers and the most feasible and effective solutions.