Med Students Get Training In Second Life Hospitals 126
Hugh Pickens writes "Discover Magazine reports that although medical simulations have been around for a long time, medical schools like Imperial College London are starting to use virtual hospitals in Second Life so students can learn their way around an O.R. before they enter the real thing. The students can also test their knowledge in the Virtual Respiratory Ward by interviewing patient avatars, ordering tests, diagnosing problems, and recommending treatment. 'The real innovation in SL clinical simulations is that they bring people together in a clinical space — you are standing next to an avatar who is a real patient, and the doctor avatar to your right is a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and the nurse to your left is at the University of Pennsylvania hospital,' says John Lester, the Education and Healthcare Market Developer at Linden Labs. The most significant benefit of SL training may be the cost. Real-life training facilities require thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars to build and maintain, while SL simulation rooms can be created for minimal costs, and accessed from anywhere in the world for the price of an internet connection. SL can also expose students to situations that a standard academic program can't duplicate: 'You can take risks that aren't safe in the real world and teach more complex subjects in three dimensions,' says Colleen Lin. 'When you're resuscitating a dummy in real life, it looks like a dummy. But you can program an avatar to look like it's choking or having a heart attack, and it looks more real to the student responsible for resuscitating it.'"
Creates barriers, doesn't knock them down (Score:5, Interesting)
Virtually every medical school in the US has a "patient simulator" laboratory where mechanical / robotic dummies are used to train future physicians. These labs also host "simulated patients," - actors, usually from the community, who are trained to play the part of a patient with a specific disease. It isn't cheap for schools to do this, but it's a lot more realistic to perform your first vaginal exam or rectal exam on a real person than in a SecondLife virtual world. Same goes for performing other aspects of the physical exam. How is a student to put their stethescope to the patient's chest, carotid arteries, abdomen, or back in order to arrive at a diagnosis when there is no mechanism to do so in SecondLife? These are things that must be experienced to learn.
If you want to learn to be a doctor - go to a real medical school, interact with both real and trained patients in real life, and learn the intricacies of the art of talking to a patient, sharing your compassion with them, and working through their problems or concerns under real conditions. When a patient with depression and suicidal ideation shows up to the Emergency Department and there are 13 other patients waiting to be seen, I have to make a decision about how much time I'll spend with them. Do I talk them through their concerns? Do I let Social Work handle it? Do I call for a psychiatry consult? Doing these things in second life are easy and have few repercussions. Calling for a psych consult at 3:00 AM on a Tuesday for simple SI and depression will get my head ripped off by the poor psychiatrist who has to come in to do what I should have been able to do myself.
All this will do is build barriers and put "blinders" onto future physicians. "It couldn't have been a heart attack - he didn't have left sided chest pain radiating to the arm and jaw. He had no shortness of breath! That's how I was taught MI's all present in Second Life!" Med schools need to stop cutting corners and trying to implement these ridiculous ways of trying to be "cutting edge." Want to be cutting edge? Implement a computerized medical record system that actually works - for starters - and institute a system by which patients evaluate their physicians in a publicly available forum so that we can see which docs should be doctors... and which shouldn't. That would do more for patient care than any of this Second Life nonsense.
Re:Shockingly sensible (Score:3, Interesting)
To get the dummies to physically appear to react to the medical conditions that they are simulating requires special effects technology. To simulate the physical behavior in a virtual world just requires some software programming.
Re:Great for hype, not great for teaching (Score:5, Interesting)
You are thinking like an organic mechanic. Very few doctors do a large amount of resuscitating and defibrillating patients. They need practice in interviewing skills to get diagnoses, which SL can give them. Getting a good patient history, and correctly interpreting it, means the difference between successfully treating the patient and not.
They need practice ordering lab tests and interpreting the results, ordering the right test, not pissing off the lab techs, not expecting TV medi-drama speed on the tests.
The hospitals can run the SL experience with ZERO investment into 3D equipment, and without taking up RL space in the hospital. I've participated in RL tyraining for interns and med students, and getting everyone into the same place at the same time is difficult. With SL, the "patient" can be in Cleveland and the med student in Detroit.
Two Sides to the Coin (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it curious that the reactions to this idea are both so sceptical and so negative. I'm not unbiased in my point of view but I do think I have a bit of objectivity gifted to me from being able to see both sides of the story here. Allow me to explain.
I'm not a nursing student nor am I a nurse, doctor or in fact anyone in the medical profession. I am, however, a third year computing student. Presently myself and my team are creating just one such environment like this, at the University of Tasmania, Australia. We've been working for quite a long time on this project, and we've faced considerable difficulties getting such a project off of the ground, not least because of a mixture of sceptics, confused requirements and because of people who had their heads in the sky thinking we can work wonders with Second Life.
Now I agree with the previous comment titled 'Creates barriers, doesn't knock them down' by CorporalKlinger, but only insofar as that face-to-face and real life training experiences cannot be replaced by Second Life training environments. There is a lot to be said from this comment - and the real experiences are indeed the most valuable of teaching methods for students in this field.
The point that is missed in this comment and many others is that the Second Life training environment is not supposed to be taken as a replacement - what is being created here, in both the instance of my own project, as well as (I assume the majority of) other projects of such a nature is a complement to existing training methods.
Before I continue I want to define what I am talking about when I henceforth use the term 'Simulation': I refer to something attempting to mimic real life in such a way as that it could be practically used in actual real life circumstances. Something taken to be as reality such that training with it would be sufficient to replace training in actuality.
The bottom line with training in Second Life, from my point of view at the very least, is that it is not a simulation and it is not meant to ever replace face-to-face learning. Anyone who claims that it is supposed to be at the simulation level and anyone who claims it will one day replace existing face-to-face methods of training is either entirely delusional or severely misinformed.
Any person who spends any amount of time in Second Life will be able to quickly assess that the environment is not one suitable for simulation level training. The controls are fiddly and odd, the world is not always easy to navigate in, there are other people around, unexpected interruptions, lag preventing any sort of decent real-time training and also any simulation level tool worth its weight should not require learning in its own right first, before the simulation can begin. That's a critical design flaw in its own right that prevents Second Life ever reaching into true simulative areas and this is unlikely to be something that ever changes. Short of the most incredible virtual reality programs, 'true' simulation that will replace real life training is at our present state of technology a practical impossibility.
That ordinary users can identify how problematic Second Life would be as a simulation should already be indicative that developers have taken this into account.
On the flipside, there are a lot of people out there, people who stand to profit or genuinely interested nurses and doctors, who might try and sell the Second Life hospitals and training environments as simulations of reality. These are dangerous waters, because developers willingly working under people who would sell their Second Life environment as a simulation are producing a dangerous tool that could stand to one day misinform people who hold the lives of others in their hands. This is a powerful point against using Second Life and is probably the underlying point in most negative criticism that I've read.
Despite the risks and scepticism involved, the benefits of using Second Life in this way (when the way it is to be used is very clearly defi
Re:Creates barriers, doesn't knock them down (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want to learn to be a doctor - go to a real medical school, interact with both real and trained patients in real life, and learn the intricacies of the art of talking to a patient, sharing your compassion with them, and working through their problems or concerns under real conditions. When a patient with depression and suicidal ideation shows up to the Emergency Department and there are 13 other patients waiting to be seen, I have to make a decision about how much time I'll spend with them. Do I talk them through their concerns? Do I let Social Work handle it? Do I call for a psychiatry consult? Doing these things in second life are easy and have few repercussions. Calling for a psych consult at 3:00 AM on a Tuesday for simple SI and depression will get my head ripped off by the poor psychiatrist who has to come in to do what I should have been able to do myself.
Your reasoning supports the premise rather than opposing it. This type of simulation allows you to encounter 1000's of such situations cheaply and quickly under conditions where no one is going to die when you screw the pooch completely. It allows for you and others to go back and much more objectively evaluate your performance without the emotion of knowing that your wrong actions just killed someone. It allows you to store in your brain a much greater range of scenarios and situations. No one is saying eliminate face-to-face training with real-life patients. Simulation allows you to be better prepared and to augment such training. It allows for much greater scope of training since face-to-face training with real-life patients is both much more expensive and much more risky. Would it be better for you to perform open heart surgery the first time on a simulator or actually slicing up a (hopefully) live patients heart? Wouldn't it be much better on a simulator where you can encounter a broad range of complications and critical situations where the patients life isn't at risk?
That reminds me of this story... (Score:3, Interesting)
That reminds me of this story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 [wikipedia.org]