Over the next 18 months the game was played by a variety of undergraduate medical students, EM residents and staff physicians, non-physician scientists, and nurses. Once the bare bones of the game had been created, along with a prototype, the game was improved via a series of Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles with McMaster trainees and Hamilton Health Sciences/St. GridlockED was subsequently prototyped and developed further at the Niagara Regional Campus of McMaster University by a group of undergraduate medical students interested in EM, under the guidance of Dr. Teresa Chan and Mathew Mercuri originally brainstormed the idea based on their own research. The authors designed GridlockED as a collaborative, serious board game that would allow EM learners to experience the role of managing the ED, and to experiment with different strategies to optimize patient flow.ĭrs. GridlockED was developed to address these challenges by creating a simulation-type experience with real-life patient scenarios and barriers to patient flow, such as bed-blocks, staffing shortages, and resource limitations. Simulation-based approaches would be ideal, but are prohibitively resource-heavy for most programs. Unfortunately, this tactic falls short in exposing trainees to the true pressures involved in this task, and Emergency Medicine (EM) residents will graduate to a staff position without ever having become proficient in this skill. The more typical arrangement is for trainees to manage a subset of emergency patients, while the supervising staff oversees the department. Unfortunately, it’s generally not feasible to give a trainee the full experience of managing an entire ED in a real-life setting until quite late in their training, if at all. Much like resuscitation and multi-patient scenarios, ED management is a skill more suited to learning through real-life or simulation-based education. Management of patient flow through the Emergency Department (ED) is a crucial skill for Emergency Physicians to master. This Feature Educational Innovation (FEI), titled, “ GridlockED: An Emergency Medicine Game and Teaching Tool” was originally posted by the CAEP EWG FEI Team in 2018 and answers the question: “ How can we train residents to manage flow in the Emergency Department?” A PDF version is available. Ken acknowledges that managing the department is something he needs to learn, but he wishes there was a way he could practice his department flow skills even as a junior resident. The teachers' area of the site has tips for deployment, plus a list of printable puzzles.Ken is a second year Emergency Medicine resident who just received the following feedback from his attending: “The shift went well, but as you continue in your training, it is important to think about the flow of the department”. It also fosters important problem solving skills logical reasoning and data surveillance techniques. Gridlocks makes an excellent summing-up activity in which students can check their own understanding of a topic. There's also a hint button, for when the grids get too confusing. The competitive element of the games is nice too – pupils compete against the clock and have only three lives before they are knocked out. For example, the puzzle on blast furnaces centred on conditions and materials needed to smelt iron – concepts that have to be remembered by making mental connections, rather than worked out. The resource was developed by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and for me it seemed to work most effectively for topics (like 'naming functional groups' and 'hazard symbols') where facts have to be learned by rote. The twist is that in Gridlocks it is chemical concepts, rather than numbers, that must 'add up'. The contents of square portions of the game board, plus the horizontal and vertical rows, must 'add up' to the same value. Gridlocks is an online game-cum-learning resource designed to help chemistry pupils learn facts in an engaging way.ĭivided into three sections, Key Stage 3, GCSE and A-level, the basic premise of the game is similar to Sudoku.
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