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Developing an International Virtual Gaming Simulation on a Patient with COPD & Complex Medication Profile

Oral Presentation 3
Miss Alison Smart, Miss Outi Lastumäki, Miss Sanna Sandström, Prof Kateryna Metersky, Prof Michelle Hughes, Miss Caitlin Cosgrove

Developing an International Virtual Gaming Simulation on a Patient with COPD & Complex Medication Profile

Introduction: Virtual Gaming Simulations (VGS) can help facilitate the theory practice gap for healthcare students. VGSs are high fidelity, 2D immersive simulations using videos of simulated participants. Users engage in clinical decisions making throughout the simulation (Verkuyl et al, 2019) The authors identified a gap within undergraduate nursing education and created a VGS focused on preparing nursing students in caring for a client with acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) with complex needs.

Objective: Develop an international VGS that provides an opportunity for students to assess and plan nursing actions to a client admitted to the hospital for acute COPD exacerbation.

Methods: The VGS was developed by the international partners, a student advisory team, following each country’s healthcare guidelines. INASCAL Standards of Best Practice were used as a guideline to inform the development of the simulation. The VGS is hosted on Pressbooks open platform for accessibility and created in H5P branching tool to incorporate interactive elements to increase student engagement. Students have an opportunity to use clinical judgement to act on the patient’s history, assessment and diagnosis. The VGS engages students in complex clinical reasoning and decision making when providing a patient-centered, holistic approach to care with members of the interprofessional team.

Outcomes: The VGS can provide an excellent experiential and interactive learning opportunity for students to demonstrate clinical judgement, reasoning, decision making and reflection within a safe environment (Lapum et al., 2018). This presentation will discuss the development process of the VGS and learning that took place.