Virtual PatientsVirtual Patients

11stst March 2011 March 2011

NOVICENOVICE

C Trace BVetMed MRCVSC Trace BVetMed MRCVS

eMedia UniteMedia Unit

What is a Virtual Patient (VP)?

• An interactive computer simulation of a patient that is used in health care education (AAMC 2008)

Why use VP’s?• Virtual patients allow the learner to take the role

of a health care professional and develop clinical skills such as making diagnoses and therapeutic decisions

• The use of virtual patient programmes is increasing in healthcare education, partly in response to increasing demands on health care professionals and education of students but also because they allow opportunity for students to practice in a safe environment

Types of VP

• Artificial patient

• Physical simulator

• Case Studies

Sarah Baillie MRCVS Most Innovative Teacher of the Year 2009RCUK Women of Outstanding Achievement in SET 2010Higher Education Academy National Teaching Fellow 2010

How did it come to this?

The Haptic Cow

Ways of navigating through a case study:• Linear • Branching • Exploratory

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•CASUS•CAMPUS, •Xerte

•OpenLabyrinth•DecisionSim

•WebSP

Factors to consider when developing a VP• Who is your end user?• Who is required to assist in the development of the VP?• What do you want your user to achieve with the VP?• Do you want the user to work independently, or in a group?• How many people will use the VP?• Does a tutor need to be present?And many more…..

Cost: benefit ratio!

eCases at the RVC

• Currently case details are recorded and captured by groups of students on rotations into Powerpoint templates. They include text, images, audio clips and videos.

• The best of these case records are repurposed into linear VP’s, which are published on VetConnect. These are going to be used for Directed Learning (DL) sessions for the 3rd and 4th year BVetMed.

• In the future these eCases will be made into branching VP’s for independent student use

eCases survey

• 78% of students think eCases gave them a better understanding of their cases

• 66% of students think eCases helped them better appreciate how to approach a case

The second half of the survey assessed how effective/useful eCases were

after they had been posted onto VetConnect as linear Virtual Patients:• 72% think eCases helped them understand a similar case • 59% think eCases were useful for revision In addition:• 87% would recommend looking at completed eCases to other

students;• 77% would have liked to have been exposed to completed eCases

before rotations, many saying in 3rd and 4th year teaching.