technology
Play it safe
In Safe Environments, players enter places such as a home, a healthcare facility, a park and a supermarket and are asked to identify safety risks and hazards for a particular patient.
USC associate professor in nursing Patrea Andersen said the game gives students and healthcare workers an alternative way to engage with this critical information.
“ We’ ve included more than 100 safety factors, which are spawned differently every time someone plays the game,” Andersen said.
Users receive points for finding and managing the risks, which are linked to the Australian national safety standards. Andersen said:“ When that element of point-scoring and competition is introduced, there’ s suddenly a lot more motivation to develop skills or knowledge that is traditionally seen as dry.”
Aged Care Insite sat down with Andersen to discuss the key features of the program and why gaming technology is a good fit for health education.
ACI: Why did USC health researchers decide to create this game? What issues were you hoping to address? PA: The notion of health and safety, and in particular looking at the requirements around undertaking risk assessment, for some is quite a dry topic. What we were hoping to do was provide a resource that would be able to engage students at a much higher level and make this particular area exciting to learn.
We know that, for example, slips, tips, falls, hazards and accidents around the home happen frequently in our community, and are a particular risk for people who are elderly and / or disabled. It’ s an important, core content, and it needs to be vitalised. It needs to be raised for people to engage in it.
A game that simulates risk management in various real-world environments can train workers and raise awareness of many hazards.
Patrea Andersen interviewed by Dallas Bastian
Serious games are a big part of health education’ s future, says a nursing academic who has helped develop one that explores safety risks and hazards in care environments.
Safe Environments was developed by University of the Sunshine Coast( USC) academics, in collaboration with Bondi Labs. It is one of two industry finalists in the 2016 Serious Games Showcase and Challenge Australasia.
What do users of the game explore? What will they encounter as they move through the spaces? The game is a competency-based simulation training game. It gives them the opportunity to apply theoretical concepts that are based on the Australian national safety standards, to enter into different environments where they have to undertake hazard identification and categorisation and risk identification, and also come up with recommendations for risk elimination or minimisation.
As an interactive game, it gives people the opportunity to work within the real, live context or without being in clinical practice. For example, some of the dwellings for users to engage in include a two-bedroom house or unit, a retirement cottage, a multi-storey dwelling, a car park, a supermarket, and a tertiary-care facility. These are life-like environments for people to be able to walk around in and interact. As a game, it means that it’ s not just about reading bits of paper and ticking off items in a workbook or that sort of thing. They can walk around in the environment. They can turn on the lights to check whether or not they are working. They can open doors, they can look in various parts of these dwellings to check for risks.
It what ways might this type of training help health professionals keep people safe in healthcare facilities, in the home and in key outdoor areas? In addition to providing real-world context, it gets people to operate in a safe environment where they can learn and experiment and apply concepts without the possibility of risks to users.
Also, although we’ ve designed it in the first instance for a tertiary education setting, it is aimed at the community and community-care sector. It is providing an opportunity to educate people who are not employed as carers and volunteers; it has a role for family and friends.
34 agedcareinsite. com. au