Culture and Health-system Adaptation of virtual Patients as collaborative learning eResources- SouthEast Asia

ongoing

Virtual patients have seen an increase in demand due to the digital education shift brought about by the global pandemic. Due to restrictions on bedside patient teaching, technology-enhanced training methods to teach clinical reasoning skills to medical students have become a key part of medical school teaching. However, resources for developing virtual patient software as well as writing patient cases are lacking in lower-middle income countries. EU partner HEIs in this project have been involved in developing an open-access library of 200 virtual patient cases under the ERASMUS iCoViP project and are experts in implementing digital education tools in existing medical curricula. These cases can be further adapted for use in other healthcare courses such as nursing and pharmacy. Therefore, this project aims to build capacity to develop, adapt and implement virtual patient software in 5 Southeast Asian schools in Malaysia (Universiti Malaya- UM, Universiti Putra Malaysia- UPM, Taylor’s University- TU) and Indonesia (Universitas Gadjah Mada- UGM, Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta- UIN), in collaboration with expert virtual patient developers from two higher education institutions in Sweden (Karolinska Institute- KI) and Poland (Jagiellonian University- JU). The project will achieve this by knowledge transfer workshops based on the iCoViP implementation guidelines for virtual patients, co-production of best-practice adaptation and implementation guides for local Malaysian and Indonesian settings that can be used across medical, nursing and pharmacy courses, and actual implementation of virtual patients in 5 undergraduate health courses.