Background: Despite a wide range of literature on emergency department (ED) overcrowding, scientific knowledge on emergency physicians’ cognitive processes coping with overcrowding is limited. Objective: This study aimed to develop and evaluate a virtual research environment that will allow us to study the effect of physicians’ strategies and behaviors on quality of care in the context of ED overcrowding. Methods: A simulation-based observational study was conducted over two stages: the development of a simulation model and its evaluation. A research environment in emergency medicine combining virtual reality and simulated patients was designed and developed. Afterwards, 12 emergency physicians took part in simulation scenarios and had to manage 13 patients during a 2-hour period. The study outcome was the authenticity of the environment through realism, consistency, and mastering. The realism was the resemblance perceived by the participants between virtual and real ED. The consistency of the scenario and the participants’ mastering of the environment was expected for 90% (12/13) of the participants. Results: The virtual ED was considered realistic with no significant difference from the real world with respect to facilities and resources, except for the length of time of procedures that was perceived to be shorter. A total of 100% (13/13) of participants deemed that patient information, decision making, and managing patient flow were similar to real clinical practice. The virtual environment was well-mastered by all participants over the course of the scenarios. Conclusions: The new simulation tool, Virtual Research Environment in Emergency Medicine, has been successfully designed and developed. It has been assessed as perfectly authentic by emergency physicians compared with real EDs and thus offers another way to study human factors, quality of care, and patient safety in the context of ED overcrowding.

Inertial response support from wind turbine generators has become a priority requirement in most grid codes to improve the frequency response and frequency stability margins of power systems. However, the interaction between MPPT and inertial controllers may significantly degrade the power system dynamics. Therefore, there is a need to comprehensively understand the electromechanical dynamics of power systems with high penetration of wind generation. In this context, this work proposes a simplified dynamic model to assess the electromechanical dynamics of modern power systems with inertial response support from wind generation. The proposed simplified model allows simple analyses of the intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of wind generation that directly affect the system frequency dynamics and the dynamics of wind turbine generators. As a secondary contribution, this work also provides a comprehensive assessment of intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of wind generation that significantly affect the electromechanical dynamics of power systems with inertial response support from wind generation.