Medical education: the role of serious games
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There is perhaps no profession where the stakes of a suboptimal education carry higher stakes. Doctors, nurses, surgeons, anaesthetists, paramedics: to perform the required skills of these positions at an acceptable level saves lives. To fall short costs them. This is where serious games offer exceptional utility as training tools. The serious game offers a low-stakes, simulated digital environment in which medical students, student nurses, and other healthcare trainees can practise skills and acquire knowledge.
A serious game is a game designed with a serious purpose at its core. These purposes can vary, from recruitment, to corporate education, or even promoting healthy lifestyle choices, but in this case, the purpose is for medical education and training. They’re not designed to pass time and entertain players, although they do utilise engaging game mechanics to be effective, so while not designed to be entertaining, they can certainly be described as being “more entertaining” than traditional training methods.
The advantages of serious games in medical training
It can take anywhere from 3 to 7 years to train and qualify depending on which medical profession a student is pursuing. Without exception, a significant amount of their training will focus on the human body and how to protect it. A living human body can last for 100 years. It’s under constant threat of disease, trauma, and degeneration, and medical students, through their studies, need to be prepared to correctly identify, diagnose, take action, and prescribe in order to allow human bodies the opportunity to survive and thrive.
Providing medical care is obviously far more complicated than restoring upholstery or repairing a car, where there are finite obstacles, and relatively low margins for errors. The human body is a profoundly complicated, temporary living machine, animated by life. Blood is pumped through a circulatory system that could all be stretched out to 60,000 miles. An enormous organic calculator is protected by the skull that in exceptional cases boasts the RAM to send rockets into space and the capacity to lead countries into prosperity. Each body presents near infinite nuance when it comes to risks and how it will react to different treatments: varying body chemistry, different allergies, blood-type compatibilities, and the health of an individual’s autonomic nervous system. The tasks can be enormous and the stakes are literally life and death. It’s one of the few industries in which there is no need for exaggeration to emphasise priorities.
For these reasons, engaging, high quality training needs to be provided. Modern online serious games represent an effective option that cannot be discounted. The main reason is because when designed thoughtfully, educational serious games can offer a rich, digital simulation through which medical students can acquire knowledge and develop skills. If they don’t quite get it right within the serious game, no patient’s health is compromised. The student can use the game to learn from mistakes, and get to grips with the concepts and knowledge necessary to their future careers, free from the same pressure they might be under while learning on the job. While both game based learning and training in the working environment are necessary, simulating experience before hitting the high pressure realities of a medical facility would be a hugely beneficial step. This helps protect medical institutions from liability and organisational issues, and also allows students to build confidence, and minimises the risk of them being overwhelmed and potentially burning out.
How to implement serious games
Students in any form of medical education are highly motivated, intelligent individuals. Nobody casually finds themselves in medical school. You can’t “fall into” being a doctor or a nurse. For this reason, you’re not utilising serious game formats to make something more sweet and appealing, as you would in the case of educational games for younger students who might exhibit less motivation, but to both provide a more engaging learning tool to help break up an incredibly rigorous and comprehensive diet of reading, research, and lectures, and to provide the safe environment of a simulation. This is a game that you can, and should, aim to make challenging.
Consider, for an example, customising a serious game that helps prepare nurses for an emergency room environment. You could take the Dynamic Path™ format on Drimify, and create multiple levels using the Quiz format that allows them to play through different emergency room scenarios. The different levels could be customised to give them practise prioritising patients based on condition, and some levels could even have them “performing” procedures on patients by correctly answering questions on the theory of the necessary treatments. The content of these levels could be customised to simulate a less busy shift as an ER nurse, and could progress to simulate incredibly busy shifts, with the latter including more difficult or unusual requirements for treatment.
The modern format of online serious games means they can be played on any modern device. They can be bought into the classroom on tablets or computers, but just as easily be played through on a smartphone, making it an incredibly adaptable learning tool for medical education.
Progress through repeatability and simulation
While the above example of a serious game might not prepare nursing students for the physical side of working in the emergency room, such as actually performing blood tests, and dressing wounds, it can go a long way to prepare them for the theoretical side. Being the first medical professional someone might encounter when they walk into a hospital after an accident requires a greater ability to assess on sight a patient’s health and what department can best care for them. Given the variability of what nurses can encounter in an emergency room, the more experience an individual has, simulated through a game or otherwise, the more relevant knowledge they’ll have and the more confident they’ll be in their ability to do their job effectively.
A tool for continuing medical education
Consider how, utilising the same game engine formats as with the prior emergency room example, you could customise a learning pathway to simulate patient appointments for doctors. This would be beneficial for medical students to use during their studies, but would also have utility as a component of continuing medical education (CME) for doctors.
Students, or players, would assume the role of doctor and interview virtual patients to test and practise their diagnostic and treatment skills through quizzes and games. In each case they would make a diagnosis and propose a treatment plan. The versatility of the Quiz format on the Drimify platform means you can make answers multiple choice, ordered, or even open. The latter option can really work as a test for what students know. It allows them zero guesswork, and gives them an opportunity to really prove how well they know their field. This is outside the high pressure environments of an exam, or where patient safety could be compromised if they’d made an error.
A tool for medical professionals to communicate with patients
Serious games also have great utility when used as a communications tool. The immersive experience and interactivity of the online serious game format makes them very well suited to acquiring new skills and acquiring knowledge, but also, as a way for medical professionals to communicate with their patients.
Online serious games can be a really effective method to communicate to patients the dangers of particularly unhealthy behaviours, or even as an immersive storytelling device through which to communicate the realities of their condition, and the best practices for managing it. A good example of this would be to customise a Dynamic Path™ experience for patients suffering from health conditions exacerbated by smoking. It could be structured to offer advancing levels based on overcoming different obstacles that prevent people from quitting. The interactive content could gradually coach players on how to beat cravings, boredom, stress, and social pressure, and any number of other factors that cause people to return to smoking.
Such virtual learning programmes not only free up staff time that may otherwise have been spent explaining and outlining the principles and content within the game, but gives patients, or players, the information and knowledge in an engaging, repeatable format that they can play through at their leisure.
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