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