Hive Health

You make a mistake, you fall over, it hurts, you cry.  Next time you’ll have learnt a little bit more and maybe you won’t fall over so much.

How do you learn to diagnose and treat a patient?

Text books, lectures, cadavers, consultant shadowing, making a mistake, mis-diagnosis, failed treatment, dead patient. Next time you’ll have learnt a little bit more and maybe the patient will survive.

Obviously this is exaggerated to push the point that we learn by our mistakes. But with medical training there’s tension between the need for real-world training and learning in a safe environment. The second life training used by Imperial College creates immersive clinical training in a safe virtual world to practice skills and teach behaviours (like hand washing, and checking for patient record inconsistencies).  Take a look at this.

So how do we apply this to the pharma industry?

Well, it depends on the training need. For acute conditions rapid assessment, treatment, surgical skills and safety are paramount. For chronic conditions the training need often includes consultation skills to promote patient engagement and compliance with treatment.

Case-based scenarios are ideal for this. By mimicking the real-life decision path that HCPs go down to make an appropriate diagnosis and treatment, scenarios can be used to promote the adoption of new language and change behaviour towards new consultation techniques. Call us if you want us to take a look at the examples we’ve developed so far and how this can work for your brand.

And, finally how do the MOD use this method for sniper training? Well if you’re tough enough, you can have a go yourself  here.