Enhancing Patient Care Communication Techniques with Virtual Training
ECS worked in collaboration with the VA Sim LEARN program to design Goals for Care Conversations to hone skills in helping a patient and their family to make palliative care decisions with empathy and thoughtful care. Palliative care is specialized medical care for people with serious illnesses, focusing on providing relief from the symptoms and stress. Proactively conducting goals of care conversations with a patient with a serious illness is important in ensuring that the patient’s values, goals, and treatment preferences are followed.
The purpose of the tool is to emphasize and reaffirm the importance of the relationship between practitioner and patient. The learner practices these skills in an immersive and realistic environment with immediate feedback from a virtual mentor to help reinforce important skills.
This virtual training program will help busy clinicians practice including the patient and their caregivers in making quality-of-life decisions.
ECS is improving the quality of healthcare services for America’s Veterans through the application of simulation-based learning strategies to clinical workforce development.
Key Features of Goals of Care Conversations include:
- High Fidelity Avatars – High-quality visuals for the patient and caregivers give a sense of realism and portray evocative responses.
- Challenging scenarios – Navigate through the challenging nuances of the soft skills of empathy and choosing not only what to say, but when and how to say it.
- Virtual Mentor and Review – A virtual mentor acts as a guide throughout the scenario to keep you on track and provide instant feedback, as well as remediation and review upon completion of a scenario.
- Ease of Access – Goals of Care Conversations uses WebGL to run natively in any modern browser without the need for additional software.
