Conference article

A core of the education of medicine and nursing students is to understand, learn and train the use of clinical procedures. Health professionals are required to apply existing clinical procedures and acquire new ones as they are developed and incorporated into clinical practice. In order to improve clinical effectiveness and increase patient safety, these clinical procedures would ideally be easily accessible and provide a didactic explanation of the steps to be followed. In this way, digital clinical procedure libraries provide health professionals and students a useful tool for learning and practice. In this context, the International Bilateral Research and Innovation Cooperation (INT-BILAT) project on evidence-based interactive clinical systems aims at studying the usability and learnability of clinical procedures libraries in a health transnational context. This paper presents early stages of the research including the results of a survey among health professionals about using electronic clinical procedure libraries or guidelines at work. The research argues that electronic procedure libraries are a steppingstone of experiential learning in healthcare education and practice, where clinical procedures are learned through experience, reflection and conceptualisation. The analysis of the survey’s answers and interviews showed the need for an enhanced digital clinical library with interactive features, drawing from immersive techniques and perspective taking (e.g., video guidelines, self-paced video instructions). The next steps of the research include a game design framework outline using immersion techniques for learners and practitioners.

Clinical library, clinical procedure, immersion, perspective taking, gamification, usability, human-centred design, eHealth.