Serious Game Versus Traditional Teaching to Improve Clinical Reasoning Skills

Detection of patient deterioration is a major healthcare problem. Indeed, acute clinical deterioration of the patient is often preceded by changes of several physiological parameters within 6 to 24h before the event occurs. The combination of i) early detection ii) rapid response and iii) efficient clinical management influences the patient's prognosis. Education of nurses, who are frontline healthcare providers, is therefore essential. Serious games might represent an interesting immersive educational tool to train a large number of healthcare professionals with high flexibility but assessment of their learning efficacy should be demonstrated. A serious game named LabforGames Warning has been developed for nursing students with the aims of improving their ability to detect clinical deterioration and to promote adequate interprofessional communication. The objective of this study will be to compare the respective value of digital simulation (using the above mentioned serious game) and a traditional teaching method to improve the clinical reasoning skills necessary to detect patient deterioration.