Improving Exercising for Acting during Crisis and Disasters

Summary: The actions of medical emergency responders during disasters and crises differ from daily care due to the scale, hectic pace, and the need to cooperate with other emergency services such as the police, fire brigade, and community care. A multitude of choices must be made in a short period to get a grip on the situation. Medical workers generally also have little experience with large-scale crises. This means that skills must be developed and maintained mainly through education, training, and drills. But the time to do that is scarce and is in addition to the requirements to maintain regular medical skills. To develop these skills, training courses have been developed via e-learning in addition to the physical courses. But real-life drills are problematic: they consume a lot of resources in health care organizations, such as ambulance services and emergency departments. Moreover, in the Netherlands, they are not used in working with volunteer Red Cross workers in the day-to-day situation, nor within the disaster organization that the government rolls out. That is why, in addition to physical drills, tabletop applications have been developed, and intensive role plays are used in small group training situations. Serious gaming combined with virtual reality is increasingly used in various places to enhance this package and make it more efficient. This field study investigated what the regions and organizations in the Netherlands are already doing and identified the gaps. A pilot is now a serious game developed, which enables individual care providers to practice working together with other care providers and AI online. This is input for national agreements with the regions to connect the separate initiatives. The aim is to achieve a coherent joint program, which makes the expensive investments possible and keeps the costs for the user low.