International Journal of Healthcare Simulation

Background:

Traditional simulation training within medical education has been well established for several decades and involves playing out emergency situations in a role-play format. This type of simulation training is typically located at hospitals and medical centres and requires considerable organization, costs, in-person attendance and allocated time away from clinical commitments. Technological transformation within healthcare education is growing and, in particular, there has been an increase in mobile applications (apps) to aid medical education. Coupling the two together has allowed ‘gamification’ to emerge and grow in popularity as a powerful tool to enhance learning retention.

Aim:

The aim of this innovation project was to create a technology-enhanced simulation app for mobile devices to train in Advanced Life Support (ALS) for cardiopulmonary arrest, using game mechanics.

Method/design:

A technology-enhanced simulation mobile app called ‘SimPL’ has been created to facilitate technology-enhanced learning on mobile devices. It allows the user to run physiological observations on a simulated patient. This has gained popularity on the Apple and Google Play Store amongst healthcare professionals. We now want to build on this and start by simulating ALS for cardiopulmonary arrest. A minimum viable demo that healthcare professionals can use to run an ALS scenario is being developed. The aim is to allow healthcare professionals to run through an interactive ALS scenario and give the user flexibility to make any decision they want regarding intervention and see how the patient responds to it. It provides real-time, haptic and constructive performance feedback to the intervention being carried out.

Implementation outline:

The use of technology-enhanced simulation for healthcare education is a novel area and with the fast acceleration of game mechanics development, there is scope for medical education to be delivered in this way. The technology-enhanced simulation app will be launched on the Apple and Google Play Store to all healthcare professionals around the world. Feedback will be gathered from users to allow further developments of the product. The overall outcome is to produce a network of mobile apps to deliver medical education in an interactive, engaging and easily accessible way to help clinicians prepare for emergency medical situations anytime, anywhere.