NextGen Learning in healthcare: practising where it counts

What makes healthcare different

Care teams work in rosters, with changing shifts and few free hours. A day of training for which everyone has to be free at the same time is hard to organise and still leaves out most of it. At the same time the work is full of situations you do not learn from a book: a bad-news conversation, an angry relative, a night shift with an emergency.

Learning briefly between shifts

Swipeslides work on the phone, in small pieces, and remember where you left off. That fits a roster: a few minutes before the shift, during the break or on the way. A learning journey about a hygiene protocol or a new procedure consists of short slides with a question, an ordering of steps and a case. See microlearning with swipeslides.

Practising difficult conversations

You learn a bad-news conversation by having it. In a CrewMate conversation the learner practises in a situation described beforehand, by typing or by voice, and gets an assessment and a final report. Motivational interviewing is also there as a starting scenario: eight worked-out cases, including workload and a new system. The author adapts it to their own setting.

The character does not judge, so you may try again. A human stays valuable for what the AI does not see. See practising with an AI role-play.

A night-time outbreak, as a team

Among the example scenarios of the scenario game is an outbreak on a care ward at night. Each player has a role with their own information, for example the nurse, the doctor on duty and the facilities department, and together they must decide. A central screen shows the story and the meters. The debrief shows who knew what when.

What you learn there is not a protocol but collaboration under pressure: who shares information, who does not, and what that means. See scenario games for decisions.

Safety and trust

In healthcare privacy weighs heavily. CoVince is ISO 27001 certified, and who sees which learning journey depends on the learning journey and the organisation. Use made-up cases for exercises and no real patient data. A good rule is that a learning journey always works with a fictional case.

An example: the handover between shifts

A good handover is one of the moments where healthcare can gain the most. A learning journey about it could consist of a short case in which information is missing, an ordering question about what belongs in a handover and a CrewMate conversation in which the learner gives a handover to a character who asks follow-up questions. The report shows which points were left out.

This is an illustration of how you could set it up, not a ready-made learning journey. The content comes from your own protocol, checked by an experienced colleague.

Support in a busy team

Healthcare professionals have little patience for training that takes time and delivers little. What helps: start with a problem the team recognises itself, keep the first learning journey small and short, have a respected colleague help design it and give time in the roster to do it. Show the first results and ask what should change.

Use the learning journey’s chat for questions about practice: that way colleagues learn from each other too. See planning classes and sessions for live moments.

Learning in a roster

The biggest practical question in healthcare is time. A learning journey of twenty minutes does not fit in a busy shift, but five times four minutes does, spread over the week. Plan learning moments around transitions: before the shift, during a quiet moment, or in a team meeting. As an organisation give explicit permission to spend working time on learning, otherwise it remains a task in your own time.

For team leaders: look in the progress at who is where, without it becoming control. Use it as a reason for a conversation, not as a list to hold people to account by.

Practising with a safe feeling

In healthcare there is shame about mistakes, because mistakes can have consequences. A practice environment in which a mistake has no consequences is therefore valuable. A conversation with a CrewMate, a scenario game with an outbreak and a 3D scene of a ward let people try, fail and try again.

Keep the debrief focused on learning, not blame. Ask: what did we know, what did we not, what could we have done? See scenario games for decisions.

What you can practise in healthcare

A few areas where practising with a CrewMate or scenario has value: bad-news conversations, a conversation with an angry or anxious relative, motivational interviewing, addressing a colleague and a handover. For team situations there are scenarios such as an outbreak at night, where division of roles, communication and priorities matter.

Choose situations that really occur and that your team says are difficult. Have an experienced colleague co-write the scenario, so it is recognisable. And use only fictional cases.

How to start

1. Choose one situation that often goes badly and that your team agrees on.
2. Let the AI make a learning journey from your protocol and have an experienced colleague sharpen it.
3. Add a CrewMate conversation for the difficult situation.
4. Play one scenario game during a team meeting, with a short debrief.
5. Look at the reports and adjust.

For more on structure, see designing the complete learning journey.