A game about safety culture

Abstract

The start of this project is a first version of a serious game that was designed by the company MEDD. This is an independent design and consultancy agency for healthcare. They designed this game as part of their ‘Met Elkaar Durven Doen’ toolbox, which they use in trainings and workshops. The Haga Hospital is the co-design partner of the game, and during the week of patient safety, a first version of this prototype was played by healthcare professionals of the Haga Hospital. The main aspect of the game are the question cards. These cards are divided into three themes: Patient Experience, Risk Management, and Culture and Behaviour. Within these themes, the players get knowledge based questions, questions to discuss, or small assignments. In a questionnaire done by MEDD in the Haga Hospital and through the reactions of the healthcare professionals that played the game, can be concluded that these three themes are themes that healthcare professionals would like to learn more about. The assignment within this project is to further develop the existing design and make it applicable to other hospitals and healthcare organisations. The Safety Game is meant to create awareness and a deeper knowledge an understanding of safety and quality within hospitals. To provide background to why this is necessary, a literature review and field research are done. From this research can be concluded that an open culture is important to manage risks in the hospital. Unfortunately, most hospitals have a blame culture, where healthcare professionals don’t correct each other or speak up in fear of the consequences. To change this blame culture into an open culture, the behaviour of the healthcare professionals needs to change. To make healthcare professionals aware of their type of culture and how to change this, a serious persuasive game can be used. To design this serious persuasive game, the Persuasive Game Design model is used. The research provided the insights to fill in the Real World Experience and the Gamification Design. From the research the goal was defined: Designing a meaningful, serious, persuasive game for healthcare professionals to gain lasting awareness on their behaviour regarding safety and how they influence their own safety and that of others. In the ideation phase, three concepts were developed. From these three, a concept was chosen that is based on the idea of an escape room idea. The final design consists of a small house that represents the hospital, a patient card, question cards in the earlier mentioned themes, a padlock to lock the hospital, three puzzles in the same themes as the question cards, and puzzle pieces. This design is tested in the Haga Hospital with healthcare professionals. The final design, the game ‘Cultuur rondom Veiligheid’, is proven to create awareness regarding culture and behaviour, and how this influences (patient) safety, thus reaching the design goal. The base of the final design can be used to be adjusted to fit other healthcare organisations or keep the game up to date by MEDD.