ZAIDA GLIBANOVIC
By ZAIDA GLIBANOVIC
MORE than 100 first-year Monash University rural health Churchill students trialled a new board game to help rural doctors understand the impacts of climate change events on medical practice recently. No, the board game did not involve removing items from cavities with tweezers like the classic family favourite ‘Operation’, instead, students played as a junior doctor in several health settings during a severe flood event. The ground-breaking gamified learning model was led by Associate Professor Margaret Simmons and Dr David Reser from Monash Rural Health Churchill. Students worked in groups and immersed themselves into one of seven settings, including an aged care facility, a GP clinic, a farm, a hospital, at home (self-care), a pharmacy, or an emergency shelter, and were forced to consider the various implications of a severe flood event on themselves and their patients. Students each had individual tokens, rolling the dice to move across the board to address different problems associated with their scenario; students also had to deal with various ‘chance’ obstacles thrown in. The game comes as a compulsory learning outcome for their studies. Taking a break from books and lecturers, students happily attended the event, where they were treated to tea and coffee and an introduction by renowned Professor Tony Capon, from the Monash Sustainable Development Institute and a former Director of Global Health at the United Nations. There were 15 staff members and several guest panellists, including a GP, pharmacist, and paediatrician roaming the auditorium to elicit students’ understanding and curiosity before joining a panel for a discussion based on student questions during the game. The game started as a summer scholarship idea by a second-year medical student, Mikaela Misso, in collaboration with five other Monash students in public health and computer science, and has now been incorporated into the rural med student training. Ms Misso and colleagues received summer scholarships to develop a board game to teach medical students how to adapt to changing patient needs due to climate change incidents such as bushfires, heatwaves, and floods. Ms Misso, the mastermind of the game, is passionate about changing the health industry’s perceptions in regard to climate change preparation. “Such disasters are expected to occur with greater frequency and severity, particularly in rural areas, as the effects of climate change become more pronounced, and we need to equip the next generation of doctors and healthcare workers to be able to deal with these crises,” she said. Associate Professor Marg Simmons, who led the proceedings, reiterated these sentiments. “I’ve been teaching climate change and sustainability for about 14 years, I felt it was something not necessarily covered in a medical curriculum, but I thought it was an important topic that should be included because our future doctors are going to be at the forefront of these changes and I think we see them first and foremost in a rural area,” she said. “We experienced flooding, we experienced bushfires, and we experienced food insecurity and air quality issues.” The gamified teaching approach is a great way to engage students in a fun and interactive way outside of didactic lectures. “Students obviously have a very packed curriculum, they obviously have to learn their anatomy and their pharmacology and their physiology, but I thought there was also space for them to learn more about sustainability and climate change,” Prof Simmons added. According to Dr Reser, the aim of the game is to help students understand the likely effects of climate change at a personal and professional level engagingly and interactively. “Allowing students to think through the impacts of climate change and rural health in this way helps them to become better-informed and more socially aware doctors as their careers unfold in a climate-changed future,” he said. Speaking to the Express, Dr Reser expressed future aspirations of expanding the use of this board game for all health sector students across the university, from pharmacy to paramedics. Monash University’s graduate-entry medicine program emphasises clinical communication skills and early clinical contact visits to medical practices, community care facilities and hospitals. Significant time is spent in rural settings, creating and building these critical skills. Students complete their first year of study at the Monash School of Rural Health in Churchill.
