For the first time in Ukraine, students from the Higher Education Institutions of Lviv, Luhansk, Dnipro, Poltava and Cherkasy participated on the “Virtual Patient Challenge”.
A competition promoted by Body Interact and placed at the Zaporizhzhya State Medical University in December 2019. Students are able to test their critical thinking and decision-making skills in a safe, educational, extremely funny and memorable environment.
“We must be prepared for all emergencies. We must be able to make decisions quickly”
Each leader of the seven different teams started by randomly choose a clinical case card. All of them had the chance to play one scenario, but only the top-three teams – the ones with the highest score – proceeded to the second round.
Providing a visual and numeric score on performance of Physical Examination, Diagnostic Activities and Treatment Approach, the platform highlighted for each of the seven teams’ their learning gaps that should be tackled and positively reinforced their knowledge and reasoning skills.
The Virtual Patient Simulator, which build up its clinical scenarios based on international guidelines and protocols, provides today’s and tomorrow’s healthcare professionals the chance to put in practice the reasoning behind each protocol.
As mentioned by one of the participants “it immediately becomes clear where you have a gap in knowledge and where you need to work harder in order to master it all”.
“Develop our clinical thinking and work better as part of a team”
Teamwork was crucial for the success of the performance of each team. The correct distribution of responsibilities made Luhansk State Medical University team the winner of the competition. However, an extremely good performance and goals achievement gave the second and third places to the Zaporizhzhya State Medical University teams.
“Today we treat virtual patients but tomorrow will be the real ones”. Highlighted by Poltava team, Body Interact was recognized as an essential tool to train future qualified specialists and the Virtual Patient Challenge a “great opportunity to test clinical skills in stressful situations”.
