Virtual patients and undergraduate anaesthesia teaching

摘要

Context and setting The virtual patient scenario provides a detailed account of a patient's illness and care, using multimedia and computing technology. It allows the student to follow a patient's progress from beginning to end, which is often not possible with real patients and within the time constraints of modern-day medical curricula. Such scenarios can also be made formative and interactive by embedding questions and feedback within the web pages. Thus, the scenario becomes a type of interactive e-learning teaching resource.Why the idea was necessary The requirements of newly qualified hospital doctors are ever changing. Today's house officer is frequently required to manage elderly and sick patients on complex medical therapies that did not exist a decade ago. To meet these new challenges, many medical schools have introduced acute medicine and resuscitation courses. In anaesthesia we have to train our undergraduates to meet the challenges of preparing often quite sick and unstable patients for surgery and dealing with their often complex after-care. Against this background of new curriculum objectives, anaesthesia attachments are often short in duration and clinical exposure to learning situations is often limited and randomly allocated. To provide our student cohort with a complete picture of what anaesthesia entails and the common problems that must be mastered, we created a virtual patient scenario in which our students could follow the steps of preoperative assessment, anaesthesia and after-care of a typical surgical patient.