Training doctors and nurses for emergency situations is a vital part of medical education. Using online serious gaming technology and a proprietary physiological model of the human body, VirtualMedSchool created an innovative program to teach emergency skills to doctors and nurses according to the internationally known and used ABCDE-method: AbcdeSIM.
Available versions are: AbcdeSIM for Doctors in a hospital, Nurses in a hospital, Severe Burns treatment, General Practitioners and Paediatrics (more to come).
The idea for AbcdeSIM comes from Dr. Stephanie Klein Nagelvoort Schuit, internist acute medicine-intensivist at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Aside from patient care, she is chair of the emergency department, but her first job is to train residents, medical students, etc. in emergency medicine.
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Dr. Schuit: “Being an instructor for many ABCDE orientated courses (MedicALS, ALS and ATLS for example), I know how important good quality training is. At Erasmus University Medical Center, we have 300 new residents who start training in a wide range of clinical specialities each year. To prepare them for their first shifts on-call, we trained them in ABCDE skills. However, we had a chronic shortage of qualified instructors, and the residents often had problems getting time-off from the work-floor to be able to train with us. We decided that a lot of the skills we were teaching them in face-to-face training, could be shown in an online virtual emergency room. This way place residents can endlessly practice their resuscitation skills (wherever and whenever they had time), without any risk to (real) patients. We firmly believe that everyone should have face-to-face training time. By using the AbcdeSIM game as part of the curriculum of the residency programs, we reduced the face-to-face training time with 50%, so we have more time for extra learning goals, and we reduced the costs considerably.”
AbcdeSIM is an accredited course for Continuing Medical Education for Dutch physicians and Nurses (the first game ever). It’s currently in use by over 6000 doctors and nurses in several hospitals in The Netherlands and the UK.
In the UK VirtualMedSchool has a collaboration with the Royal College of Physicians to support the national IMPACTcourse and is a partner in foundation process of the Faculty of Remote and Rural Healthcare as part of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh.
You can find more about AbcdeSIM here: http://virtualmedschool.com/abcdesim
