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.
Abstract Objective By exploiting video games technology, serious games strive to deliver affordable, accessible and usable interactive virtual worlds, supporting applications in training, education, marketing and design. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of such a serious game in the teaching of major incident triage by comparing it with traditional training methods. Design Pragmatic controlled trial. Method During Major Incident Medical Management and Support Courses, 91 learners were randomly distributed into one of two training groups: 44 participants practiced triage sieve protocol using a card-sort exercise, whilst the remaining 47 participants used a serious game. Following the training sessions, each participant undertook an evaluation exercise, whereby they were required to triage eight casualties in a simulated live exercise. Performance was assessed in terms of tagging accuracy (assigning the correct triage tag to the casualty), step accuracy (following correct procedure) and time taken to triage all casualties. Additionally, the usability of both the card-sort exercise and video game were measured using a questionnaire. Results Tagging accuracy by participants who underwent the serious game training was significantly higher than those who undertook the card-sort exercise [Chi2=13.126, p =0.02]. Step accuracy was also higher in the serious game group but only for the numbers of participants that followed correct procedure when triaging all eight casualties [Chi2=5.45, p =0.0196]. There was no significant difference in time to triage all casualties (card-sort=435±74s vs video game=456±62s, p =0.155). Conclusion Serious game technologies offer the potential to enhance learning and improve subsequent performance when compared to traditional educational methods.