The Pharmacy Game Newsletter

From day to day, the complexity of health care increases. Interprofessional collaboration, i.e. multiple health workers from different professional backgrounds working together with patients, families, carriers and communities is needed to deliver the highest quality of care across settings. Many professional bodies have formulated interprofessional collaboration to be a core competency of health professionals when graduating.

Teaching students in interprofessional collaboration is still very fragmented and often absent. Having this in mind, two questions remain to be answered: how to enhance interprofessional collaboration and what educational tools to use for practicing interprofessional education?

"Interprofessional education brings different health-care perspectives into a mutual learning environment to complement each other towards best patient care practices."

Simulation in medical education is increasingly recognized as a core concept for training the practical skills of students. More recently, virtual reality has been used to enhance the effectiveness of the simulation methods. Combining this with using gaming in education is ideal to increase motivation and achieve better educational outcomes in a safe environment. The pharmacy game, conceptualized as such, allows practicing interprofessional education. Currently, collaboration with pharmacy assistants in training and medical students is established. The pharmacy assistants are experiencing consults in the simulated  pharmacy, as well as interviews for joining the pharmacy team. Medical students are playing the role of general practitioners that communicate with the pharmacy students, the pharmacists, when a consultation over a patient or a prescription is needed, or during activities related to the best practices on medication utilization. The next goal is to add nurses in training into the collaborating circle of health-care professionals and allow students to meet closer the different perspectives for providing optimal patient care. Practicing interprofessional education within the pharmacy game allows various healthcare professionals in training to learn with, about and from each other.