You Got Game: How Fun Benefits Continuing Education

McKnight's Long Term Care News (02/08/23) 

Continuing education can incorporate games and other fun activities to improve learning and knowledge retention among healthcare staff at long-term care facilities, writes Medline's Caryn Arnold, RN, BSN, MBA, CNOR(E). "A growing number of medical schools with gamified training platforms include educational games, mobile medical apps and virtual patient scenarios," Arnold notes. "This means future healthcare workers may expect to encounter these kinds of applications for their continuing education when they enter the 'real world.'" Simulations and virtual reality constructs are among the gamification methods available for healthcare education. Gamification's benefits to healthcare and wellness-related programs include progress bars for measuring success; cultivating a competitive spirit for sharing progress with friends or other participants; and instilling a sense of achievement by awarding users virtual gifts as they progress. Arnold lists skills for deploying gamification into post-acute systems, such as teamwork, technological savvy, customer relations, leadership, sales/marketing and decision-making/goal-setting. "A back-to-basics approach for long-term care facilities that includes implementing targeted education and training programs that are creative, innovative and engaging, finding ways to make manual observations more efficient, and using champions to support continuing education can lead to improvements in clinical standardization," she concludes.

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