GridlockED: A Serious Game for Teaching About Multipatient Environments

Photo courtesy of Thomas Owen and Teresa Chan. “Emergency department gridlock is in effect.” I used to hear this nearly every day as a clinical clerk, but at first, I had no idea what it really meant. Clinical training starts with an emphasis on the individual patient, as you explore one case at a time to understand what is going on. Over time, you move on to care for multiple patients at once, gaining more responsibility. It is at this point that many students, myself included, struggle. The paradigm changes; it is no longer you and one patient, it is you and three, five, or even twenty patients. Through trial and error, we learn to better manage our time: we learn to focus on just the pertinent elements of a patient’s history, prioritize tasks by acuity or resource intensiveness, and become more efficient at analyzing information. Some people may develop this skill immediately, for others it may take until late in their residency, and for a few it may never come. At some point, you begin independent practice, and you are suddenly in charge of managing a whole emergency department, clinic, or ward. As our health care system faces increasing resource pressures, the ability to manage a clinical system is becoming more of a necessity. GridlockED is a “serious game”—that is, it’s a game intended for more than just fun—that aims to address this educational gap, specifically in the specialty of emergency medicine. As described in a recent Academic Medicine Innovat...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Featured Guest Perspective clinical care emergency department game multiple patients Source Type: blogs