Missive Project on BBC Global TV HealthShow

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Major Incident Simulations

Introduction
The MISSIVE project (Major Incident Scenario Simulation in Virtual Environments) seeks to determine the feasibility of utilising virtual world environments as training adjuncts for major incident simulation.  The project has been funded by the UK Health Protection Agency.

What is the need?
An effective response is to a major incident is dependent on the training, preparation and co-ordination of the pre-hospital and intra-hospital facilities that receive and treat the casualties. There is evidence that many healthcare providers in developed countries are poorly prepared to deal with major incidents and that staff are not familiar with major incident plans or confident of their role in an incident. Importantly, major incident response requires a different skill set from everyday practice. Current training methodologies can be expensive, difficult to both organise and analyse, and are often inaccessible to many responders.

What have we done?
Imperial College have created three virtual world scenarios and environments to demonstrate the capability of virtual worlds in simulation of a major incident. The scenarios are currently being validated by users and experts. The scenarios demonstrate pre and intra-hospital response from both clinical and management perspectives. Participants are evaluated using validated clinical and non-technical skills assessments.

Details of the Research: NIHR Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality at Imperial College

Publications 
Evaluation of the data collected, validation and proof of concept. The results were published in Resuscitation Vol 84: Dave Taylor Publications

What is the next stage?
Evaluation of the data collected should lead to validation and proof of concept. The results will be published in appropriate academic journals.

Workshop
Our interactive workshop at The Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds Conference in Second Life on May 11th 2011 was attended by 50 people from around the world

 Click this SLURL to visit.

Further details
• Here is a short movie clip illustrating one of the scenarios we developed for paramedics involved in major incident casualty triage and treatment.

• This poster, describing our virtual patient technology was a prize winning submission for the 2011 “Medicine Meets Virtual Reality” conference.

• Presentation at LEEF (June 16 2011): Summary

Designing Worlds tours some of our sims

I just added a link to this tour of some of our clinical environments in Second Life that was filmed by Treet TV for Designing Worlds. My thanks to the Designing Worlds team for a job well done. I enjoyed the filming experience that spanned 3 continents (in US, UK and SciLands), involved 2 camera crew, 2 reporters, a sound engineer, director and 3 of us (myself in Hampshire and Robin in Birmingham (both from Imperial College) and our collaborator, Suzanne, in Brighton – both real and virtual). View the tour.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 8,400 times in 2010. That’s about 20 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 2 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 44 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 948kb.

The busiest day of the year was April 13th with 59 views. The most popular post that day was Imperial College Islands Tour Part 2.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were nanodave.com, ithirewire.com, medmedia.wordpress.com, healthcareinnovationexpo.com, and rapichat.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for virtual, virtual social networks, virtual world, medical school, and second life publications.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Imperial College Islands Tour Part 2 July 2009

2

Imperial College Islands Tour Part 1 February 2009
1 comment

3

Virtual World and Social Networking March 2007
1 comment

4

My Presentations November 2007
3 comments

5

Patient Experience in Brighton June 2009

Wellnote live on the iTunes App Store

Wellnote screenshot

Wellnote by Dr Darzi – a new free application for patients is now available on the iTunes Store.  Its features include:

• Find and Rate hospitals, dentists, GPs and  other services
• Store your medical history and those of your family
• Appointment and medication lists, reminders and test results
• Daily health news

Read more and download it from here.

Please comment here if you have any feature requests for the next version.