Improving the quality of care by playing games

Taking designs and components from games and applying them to everyday life is the focus of a workshop in Prince George.

Gamification helps in areas such as healthcare by taking something like a countdown; making people feel a sense of urgency to complete a task.

This also highlights the importance of sharing goals and creating teams to solve complex challenges.

Director of Learning and Capability Development for the BC Patient Safety & Quality Council, Shari McKeown, says they originally created this project back in 2013, to make strategies to promote the use of protocols for those with sepsis.

“We created a campaign called 150 Lives in 150 Days campaign so we set a time limit and encouraged people to put together a team and join us. It was all voluntary and we had teams join us from 33 emergency departments around the province and they worked together to try and use as many evidence-based protocols to care for patients with sepsis as they could.”

Over 1,000 patients were screened for sepsis and teams were able to work together and use 750 protocols saving 150 lives in 150 days.

There is also a motivational theory aspect to this workshop that helps with changing behavior in some positive way, added McKeown

“So it’s really about thinking through the different game components understanding intrinsic motivators for people and extrinsic motivators and how to incorporate components that help people to provide the best care as they possibly can for people in BC.”

Their main focus has been on healthcare but she sees no reason why this activity can’t be applied to other sectors.