Serious gaming as a training tool for medical students to improve patient safety

Abstract

Patient safety education for medicine students is needed to decrease preventable adverse events in Health Care. In 2011, the University Medical Center Utrecht (The Netherlands), developed the Serious Game ‘’Air Medic Sky-11’’ (AMS-1). The Erasmus Medical Centrum Rotterdam is interested in whether or not they can use this Serious Game as a training tool for their fifth year medical students to improve their patient safety skills. To answer this question the game AMS-1 and an E-module that was created for this purpose were studied for their effectiveness in the following items: (1) knowledge, (2) self-reported skill and (3) self-reported behavior in stress and awareness on patient safety related issues. Analysis on this subject show an significant increase in knowledge, but not in self-reported skill or in self-reported behavior. Therefore it is very questionable that AMS-1 should be used as a training tool for their fifth year medical students, also since a simpler and cheaper E-module had the same effect on these items. This study does not deny that AMS-1 does not work effectively for its intended purpose, but rather that this might not be the best target group for this game. A summary of the underlying findings and reasons can be found in the discussion/conclusions section.