Serious Games in Formal Medical Education: An Experimental Study

Medical knowledge has increased exponentially in the last decades. Healthcare professionals face a life- time challenge in medical education right from the beginning of medical school. They experience serious difficulties to keep updated. Traditional adult education, largely used in medical training, shows little effectiveness. Problem-based-learning has been proposed as a student-centred pedagogy to overcome failure of traditional medical instruction. A more recent trend is related to the use of serious games. Although, there are still few examples of serious games for medical education, the increased interest shown in the latest years shows that this is an important area and with a lot of potential to explore. In this paper we present the serious game Critical Transport, targeted at medical students with the aim to teach and train the recommendations for the transport of critically ill patients. This game was designed and validated with physicians of an academic hospital and tested during a formal class.