What is SARG?
The Simulation Assessment Research Group (SARG) is a U.S. national multidisciplinary consortium of researchers and educators interested in promoting the use of medical simulation to study clinical performance, expertise decision making, and education, primarily in the context of the management of critical or crisis events. The domain focus to date has been anesthesiology although the SARG’s research findings are applicable to other acute care clinical specialties (e.g., emergency medicine, critical care, surgery) and are likely generalizable to non-medical domains (e.g., aviation, military, firefighting).
SARG researchers represent twelve institutions, the American Board of Anesthesiology, and private industry, allowing us to increase the scope and generalizability of our work. The SARG team includes clinicians, human factors and cognitive engineers, behavioral psychologists, psychometricians, statisticians, and informatics professionals.
Our goals are to decrease barriers to the use of simulation in education and assessment, create the infrastructure to improve the design and development of effective simulation-based assessment, and define issues and/or shortcomings that limit simulation’s usage as an assessment modality. We are also interested in the why of clinician performance, using simulation as a tool to understand clinician behavior and decision-making during patient care.
