Pursuit Game

Initial situation

The Interprofessional Simulation Center (CiS) organizes each year an interprofessional week (read the related project) for students as part of their longitudinal program. The project partners are the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva, the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (ISPSO) and the Haute Ecole de Santé de Genève (HEdS).

The first activity of this week is a medical pursuit game in the city. The pedagogical objective is to offer students a life-size learning experience. During this immersion, they will explore a part of the Geneva health care network within and outside the hospital and discover the roles of several health care professions.

The goal of this project is to offer an innovative pedagogical activity that will make students more autonomous and proactive in carrying out activities. This allows for a reduction in the number of supervisors required for the rally-type activity implemented in previous years.

The teaching team worked in collaboration with Gus&Co, a company specializing in immersive and multimedia activities, which helped them create this fun and fantastic investigation.

Project implementation

The interprofessional week involves 600 students from 7 different fields (Nursing, Midwifery, Physiotherapy, Medical Radiology, Nutrition & Dietetics, Medicine and Pharmacy). They are divided into 74 mixed teams of 7-8 students, each including at least one student in pharmacy, one in nursing and one in medicine. The rest of the group is randomly selected.

The pursuit game is scheduled for one day, beginning at 9:00 a.m. with the announcement of the main enigma: Ava Grey, a pregnant victim of a work-related accident, has disappeared from the intensive care unit where she was hospitalized in critical condition. Clues suggest that she has been visiting various care facilities around the city. Students are charged with finding her and discovering how and why she disappeared before the game ends at 4 p.m.

Throughout the day, students must solve missions that simulate or evoke the authentic activities of professional teams in different locations. Successful completion of these missions will provide the clues needed to solve the main puzzle of the game.

From the CMU esplanade, the 74 groups will depart in stages. The students will visit 9 locations in the care and training network. An electronic map of Geneva with the places to be visited is provided to the students, as well as QR codes giving access to the instructions, rules of the game, missions and roles to be held in the team. In each of these places, one or more missions involve several professions in their interprofessional work, with a particular focus on one of them, depending on the identity of the place in question. The different places to be covered are the following: Youth Health Service (SSEJ; Nutrition & Dietetics), Roseraie Birth Center (Midwifery), HUG Primary Care Medicine Service (Medicine), Haute Ecole de Santé (Medical Radiology Technique), Imad (Nursing), Pharma 24 (Pharmacy), Hôpital des Trois-Chênes (HUG; Physiotherapy / Medicine and Nursing), the Interprofessional Simulation Center (CiS; All fields, interprofessional) and the HUG Innovation Center (All fields, interprofessional).

Students can go to any location at any time and are encouraged to split into two sub-groups to be able to cover all the locations more quickly and exchange the information gathered. A supervisor is present at each location. For the creation of the missions, experts and trainers from the different fields were involved. Here are some examples of the missions carried out: recognizing the different machines used for radiodiagnosis; calculating the term of a pregnancy by using the obstetrical wheel and discovering the specific equipment of the midwife; calculating the sugar content of different foods by using a professional site; consult a medical file and deduce the role of the different professionals involved in medical follow-up (in this case, gestational diabetes); handle an elevator for people with reduced mobility; take measurements with a goniometer; consult the primary care physician’s file and deduce the role of the pharmacist. In general, each assignment drew on the complementary skills of the different health care fields and mobilized their ability to work as a team and collaborate to solve the assignments and the puzzle.

No special report is expected from the students following this activity. A debriefing of the story and the solution to the puzzle is given to all 600 students in a plenary session.

Thoughts and advice

The evaluation carried out with the students and trainers reveals a mixed assessment following the activity. The students generally think that the activity is relevant, fun, original and attractive. It allows students to meet each other. However, the game was judged not to be sufficiently immersive. Some students did not understand the story of the missing patient as a whole. Each mission did not provide a sufficiently important clue to advance the investigation.

The assessment of the coordinating team emphasizes that this activity forces the trainers to articulate their missions and to work in an interprofessional manner. In addition, it enabled fewer teaching resources to be mobilized for the day’s activities than the rally. The team also noted that the material created could be made sustainable and could be adapted to an even larger number of students.

Concerning the collaboration with Gus&Co, the organizing team notes that it is more difficult to have access to health care facilities than to places with which Gus&Co is used to working (museum, etc.). On the other hand, the specifications of the external provider were not always well defined: it was difficult to know who is in charge of what. It was very complex to co-construct the game itself and the missions linked to the educational objectives. It is necessary to find the best articulation between the game and the professional objectives, which was not always the case. The team notes a certain lack of methodology to allow a coherence of the story and the link with the missions.

A number of points could be improved in future editions. Some of the locations chosen (the Hôpital des trois chênes in particular) were too far away geographically from the others. The flow of students in some places must be rethought. The places where students have to handle objects should not receive too many students at the same time. This will require a rethinking of the hours of operation of the various locations, which had been staggered throughout the day. The students were too quick and the places that could accommodate a lot of students opened too late in the day.

The teaching team draws attention to the fact that, depending on the make-up of the group, the experience can be particularly positive for the students or, on the contrary, particularly disappointing if the group is not motivated, cohesive or collaborative. A work on group cohesion before participating in the activity is implemented in the curriculum (group analysis of individual interviews conducted beforehand) but the students do not necessarily adhere to the format and do not always participate in this activity which would allow the groups to bond.

Student feedback

A first evaluation was done at the end of the game day. The students were invited to debrief as a team and to produce 3 key words about the experience. The key points were posted on a Padlet wall (1 post-it per group). A word cloud was created from the verbatims of the posts. A second evaluation was carried out through a questionnaire of evaluation of the activity on 3 points: the achievement of the pedagogical objectives, the evaluation of the game itself, the pedagogical modality in a more general way.