Second Life is a “virtual” world where users act and communicate using avatars.
A medical school in the UK is experimenting with the platform, where “students [via their avatars] enter a patient’s room and their work begins. Because their assignment takes place in a respiratory ward, they can access recordings of real-life patients’ breathing to help with their diagnoses. And if students decide that X-rays are needed, they can stroll down to the radiology department and order them.”
So, can this Sim-hospital replace real medical training? Likely not, but as the students report, it does give a nice change of pace from the usual.
This novelty approach to learning is unlikely to become anything more than a fad, and probably can help more with learning how to do procedures. A virtual trainer to help insert a central line, for instance, would be tremendously helpful.
But, interacting with patients? It takes talking to real people for students to develop good bedside manner.
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{ 3 comments }
On the opposite end of the medical education spectrum from Second Life, we recently published an editorial about the importance of bedside teaching.
Pamela Powers, MPH
AJM Managing Editor
I think you are being a bit negative about the possibilities of Second Life in medical education. At UC Davis I and my colleagues have set up a “virtual psychosis” environment to teach students about the lived experience of schizophrenia – what it is like to have auditory and visual hallucinations. This has been highly successful. A sample “psychotic environment” is available in Second Life for all users to sample – put “hallucinations” into the SL search engine. I have also put a video clip on youtube – again “hallucinations” will find it. My view is that for role play, and team experiences, there is a real opportunity to use SL for medical education. Peter Yellowlees MD. http://www.informationagehealth.blogspot.com
Not just used in the UK – http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/15-can-medical-students-learn-to-save-real-lives-in-second-life
They train pilots in virtual simulators for the really bad/anomalous system failures. In fact, you could probably say that we landed on the moon thanks to virtual simulators.
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