Using simulated digital role plays to teach healthcare ‘soft skills’

Abstract

Training deficits in 'soft skills' -personal or nontechnical skills -have long been lamented by educators and employers despite longstanding evidence of their importance. Virtual environments, combined with online learning management and reporting platforms, offer potential for addressing this gap through affordable and scalable simulations. This paper aims to summarise virtual 'soft skills' work undertaken to date, and to explore practical issues encountered by development teams working in this area. The first section provides historical overviews of the 'soft skills' term and related digital training initiatives. This is followed by a case study of an interdisciplinary team of Australian software developers, researchers and educators who have built a series of virtual healthcare products. The case study reports on a number of challenges encountered by the team.

Teaching Soft Skills in Engineering Education: An European Perspective

“…Schutt et al [42] presented a digital role play simulation for teaching healthcare soft skills. In this work, students play the role of a doctor that interacts via text with a virtual patient, an AIML chatterbot that reacts and recognizes specific diagnostic questions from students.…”

An Evaluation of Virtual Reality Role-Play Experiences for Helping-Profession Courses

“…If the virtual client makes a non-sensical response to a straight-forward question this can break immersion. Schutt et al (2017) recently concluded that until both the sophistication and affordability of AI technology significantly improves, a more practical short-term solution might be using decision-tree approaches. In this approach, the interaction with the virtual client resembles a semi-structured conversation like the formula used in popular role-playing computer games.…”

“…However the standardized client or standardized patient approach is associated with logistical and financial challenges (Caltabiano et al, 2018). Similar to others, we seek to harness novel technological solutions to provide role-play experiences in a more flexible and scalable format (Goldingay et al, 2018;Maicher et al, 2019;Parsons, 2015;Schutt et al, 2017).…”

The Potential of Big Data Research in HealthCare for Medical Doctors’ Learning

“…On the VOSviewer software tool one may add the following: [40,44,45] With the growing barriers presented to medical practice, MDs will need to better equip their decision capabilities with more patient-and service-focused decisions, wherein nowadays patients are possessing more information capacity and better decision judgments that are bringing new complexities in doctor-patient discussions. Decision making [33,[46][47][48] The democratisation of data and generalised data access to medicine specialists and general practitioners is bringing new real capacity to treatment, diagnostics, and medication selection to healthcare professionals. Currently, a number of different organisations are already investing exponentially in data centralisation and new rules for data access and security that can bring better outcomes and insights to any HCO department as well as professional decisions, where new technical, as well as non-technical skills, will be required from MDs to understand, interpret and expedite on-demand decision-making processes.…”