It is widely acknowledged that debriefing within or following simulation-based education promotes reflection on and about practice. Resuming in-person simulations post-COVID-19 in our educational setting revealed that post-simulation debriefing was lacking. Given the large numbers of students and casual clinical educators we embarked on a project to reintroduce debriefing to simulation activities. While several frameworks exist to guide debriefing in clinical settings, approaches to debriefing undergraduate students in educational settings differ in intent and context and needs to align with local curricula and regulatory standards of practice. Acknowledging the substantial impact to teaching practices of this project, we used an educational co-design approach to maximise staff engagement, ownership and adoption of a local fit-for-purpose debriefing framework. We applied the 5 steps within the educational Connected Learning at Scale framework to project activities: explore/ideate; plan/design; build/test; implement/observe and reflect/evaluate. The aim of this paper is to provide details of the processes undertaken in developing an evidence-informed fit-for-purpose tool for use at-scale, engendering engagement and ownership, for context specific implementation. While developed with debriefing for simulation in mind, the localised, fit-for-purpose tool is flexible and appropriate to use for other university learning contexts.
Kelly et al. (2026) studied this question.