Christopher Hicks

I am a Clinician Educator in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto (Rank: Assistant Professor). My program of research focuses on the use of high-fidelity human patient simulation to improve non-technical skills for inter-professional teams in emergency medicine, critical care and trauma. To perform effectively during a complex, high stakes resuscitation, inter-professional teams must effectively communicate, distribute tasks dynamically, maintain situation awareness, and manage stress and distractions in order to bring to bear the required technical and knowledge-based skills. My program of research examines other high stakes, high reliability occupations such as aviation, military and athletics to develop domain-specific training interventions, which are then implemented and evaluated in a controlled experimental environment using patient simulation. Outcomes of interest are observable improvements in team performance both in the simulation laboratory as well as the in-situ clinical environment.