Abstract
This chapter calls for reflection on one of the most promising technologies in healthcare education, the use of virtual patients and clinical virtual simulation as a pedagogical strategy to improve clinical decision-making and enhance clinical safety and healthcare quality. This chapter discusses the new challenges in healthcare education and the use of clinical virtual simulation in undergraduate healthcare education and lifelong learning, integrating gamification and serious games as strategies to increase intrinsic and extrinsic students' motivation. Considering the novelty of this topic, this chapter will be strategic for technology developers and healthcare educators, identifying emerging challenges and opportunities.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Gamification: Gamification in healthcare means the application of elements used to create games in settings different from these, looking for a more expressive engagement of students. The intention is to use the specificities and advantages of games for real concepts, processes, and real clinical situations, increasing the challenges and the fun of their participants.
Healthcare Simulation: Technique through which each participant can train, assess, investigate and integrate knowledge to ensure client safety. This provides a better understanding of human reactions to our decision-making and implemented interventions. Healthcare Simulation can be performed online, including the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of virtual clients.
Virtual Reality Simulation: Use of immersive visual and 3D elements to recreate health conditions/situations and/or health procedures. It differs from computer-based simulation in that it includes other support tools such as the computer keyboard, mouse, voice recognizer, touching devices or mobility sensors.
Serious Games: Game designed for an educational purpose, making allow the training of the decision-making and interventions of a real-life case, in such a way as to solve the problems found, so that its ending is not just to be entertainment.
Simulation-Based Learning Experience: A group of structured activities representing real or possible situations, in training and in practice implementation. With this activity’s participants increase knowledge and improve skills, providing a more appropriate solution to a clinical case, in a simulation context.
Simulation: A technique that produces a circumstance or scenario, allowing the individual to experiment with a reproduction of a real experience so they can practice, test and evaluate the effect of their choices or operations.
Clinical Virtual Simulation: Clinical virtual simulation (CVS) is a reality represented on a computer screen involving real people operating simulated systems. Using CVS, people can actively experience decision making, motor control and communication.
MOOC: Open online courses, accessible to everyone with access to internet. The great majority of such courses are free and require no previous conditions for its realization. Some of them consist of interdependent modules, creating a learning journey, which culminates in the achievement of a certificate.