Approximately ten percent of newborns require some help with their breathing at birth. About one percent require extensive assistance at birth which needs to be administered by trained personnel. Neonatal resuscitation is taught through a simulation based training program in North America. Such a training methodology is cost and resource intensive which reduces its availability thereby adversely impacting skill acquisition and retention. We implement and present RETAIN (REsuscitation TrAIning for Neonatal residents) -- a video game to complement the existing neonatal training. Being a video game, RETAIN runs on ubiquitous off-the-shelf hardware and can be easily accessed by trainees almost anywhere at their convenience. Thus we expect RETAIN to help trainees retain and retrain their resuscitation skills. We also report on how RETAIN was developed by an interdisciplinary team of six undergraduate students as a three-month term project for a second year university course.
The rising popularity of video games has seen a recent push towards the application of serious games to medical education and training. With their ability to engage players learners for a specific purpose, serious games provide an opportunity to acquire cognitive and technical surgical skills outside the operating room thereby optimizing operating room exposure with live patients. However, before the application of serious games for surgical education and training becomes more widespread, there are a number of open questions and issues that must be addressed including the relationship between fidelity, multi-modal cue interaction, immersion, and knowledge transfer and retention. In this chapter we begin with a brief overview of alternative medical surgical educational methods, followed by a discussion of serious games and their application to surgical education, fidelity, multi-modal cue interaction and their role within a virtual simulations serious games. The chapter ends with a description of the serious games surgical cognitive education and training framework (SCETF) and concluding remarks. The educational potential of a computer-controlled patient simulator was tested by the University of Southern California School of Medicine. The results of the experiment suggest unequivocally that there is a twofold advantage to the use of such a simulator in training anesthesiology residents in the skill of endotracheal intubation: (a) residents achieve proficiency levels in a smaller number of elapsed days of training, thus effecting a saving of time in the training of personnel, and (b) residents achieve a proficiency level in a smaller number of trials in the operating room, thus posing significantly less threat to patient safety. The small number of subjects in the study and the large within-group variability were responsible for a lack of statistical significance in 4 of 6 of the analyses performed; however, all differences were substantial and in the hypothesized direction. Thus, despite the narrowly circumscribed tasks to be learned by the experimental subjects, the findings suggest that the use of simulation devices should be considered in planning for future education and training not only in medicine but in other health care professions as well. Human error is believed to contribute to the majority of negative anesthesia outcomes. Because retrospective analysis of critical incidents has several shortcomings and prospective studies are limited by the low frequency of critical incidents, an anesthesia simulator was used to evaluate the manage Background: The application of digital games for training medical professionals is on the rise. So-called ‘serious’ games form training tools that provide a challenging simulated environment, ideal for future surgical training. Ultimately, serious games are directed at reducing medical error and subsequent healthcare costs. The aim was to review current serious games for training medical professionals and to evaluate the validity testing of such games. Methods: PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, PsychInfo and CINAHL were searched using predefined inclusion criteria for available studies up to April 2012. The primary endpoint was validation according to current criteria. Results: A total of 25 articles were identified, describing a total of 30 serious games. The games were divided into two categories: those developed for specific educational purposes (17) and commercial games also useful for developing skills relevant to medical personnel (13). Pooling of data was not performed owing to the heterogeneity of study designs and serious games. Six serious games were identified that had a process of validation. Of these six, three games were developed for team training in critical care and triage, and three were commercially available games applied to train laparoscopic psychomotor skills. None of the serious games had completed a full validation process for the purpose of use. Conclusion: Blended and interactive learning by means of serious games may be applied to train both technical and non-technical skills relevant to the surgical field. Games developed or used for this purpose need validation before integration into surgical teaching curricula.