GridlockED: board game helps med students
Goal is to balance patient safety, earn 500 points and survive the shift
This isn’t your childhood board game Operation.
A team, including a local emergency department doctor and medical students, has developed GridlockED Game to help medical trainees learn how to balance multiple patients.
“Right now, it’s rated 18-plus because of blood, guts and gore,” says team lead Teresa Chan, a Hamilton Health Sciences emergency department doctor and McMaster University associate professor.
Chan did her thesis on handling a multiple patient environment and said it’s often hard to find practical training for those scenarios outside of a real emergency department.
She was talking about this with a friend at a James Street North coffee shop a few years ago, when he suggested she create some sort of simulation. She replied — “a board game?”
They started designing what the game might look like right at that table. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Chan said, adding she texted her friend back later that night with more details about what the game would look like.
She put a team together and did game-testing this summer. Last week, they got a long-awaited hard copy.
This is how the game works: Choose a health-care provider — there is one doctor, one resident, four registered nurses, a radiologist and a consultant. There are five patient types ranging from most serious (CTAS 1) to least (CTAS 5).
The game is basically everyone working together, balancing patients in the appropriate area of the hospital — resuscitation zone, step-down zone, intermediate zone, minor zone and waiting room. You get points for completing tasks. There are three goals: survive your eight-hour shift, get at least 500 points and keep patients safe (three strikes and you’re out).
In a real hospital, being gridlocked is when there are no more beds to admit patients; in the game, that can happen if you fail to immediately place a highestpriority patient in the resuscitation zone, if all rooms are full, or if you fail to stabilize the top two priority patients quickly.
The game is still being tested, but Chan hopes to eventually have it used in curriculum. All proceeds from the game will go to McMaster for research and innovation.
She also hopes to create a pared-down version accessible to the general public.