Education for clinical practice is a complex process, involving the development of a body of knowledge, skills and multiple aspects of professionalism. ‘Traditional’ approaches, with modules in single discipline biosciences, bear little relationship to eventual learner needs for clinical practice. Practitioners act by synthesising a range of relevant information, identifying and testing solutions. Developing competence in this crucial process requires an approach that differs from traditional teaching, where students are recipients of information. Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is one example of widespread form of learning which uses patient simulation to create a learning style close to the needs of practice. Virtual patients (VPs) are encouraging students to use their knowledge base to explore simple management decisions as they work through patient scenarios. The objectives of the CROSESUS project are following. (i) To introduce innovative pedagogy methods using scenario-based learning tools, virtual cases and patients thus to enable future physicians and healthcare professionals to simulate important steps in the diagnostic and therapeutic process before exposure to patients. (ii) To transfer know-how and best practices from the institutions which have already gone through a successful implementation of authentic, motivating, competency-based learning styles into the medical curriculum. (iii) To link with the existing regional (Czech/Slovak) medical education network MEFANET and other European projects with similar objectives and use this wide community of students and teachers to disseminate the patient cases and project’s outputs more widely. The project partnership has been based upon long-standing collaborations and awareness of each other’s work, and shared research interests between three institutions: 1) Institute of Biostatistics and Analysis at Masaryk University (Czech Republic), Department of Medical education at St George's University of London (United Kingdom) 3) Faculty of Medicine at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice (Slovakia). CROESUS trains academics and students to create their own learning and teaching content and introduce interactive patient systems as well as innovative pedagogy methods in the form of VPs into the clinical elements of the course. It transfers knowledge from leaders in virtual patient (VP) development and effectively implements VPs in the medical curriculum of the participant institutions. It engages with other partners and networks, particularly the MEFANET network, to increase the use of such platforms and methodologies in the wider community. Importantly, it presents these within the culture and languages of the participant countries. The project comes up with two intellectual outcomes: 1) ICT platform for scenario-based learning, 2) Methodologies for preparation, training and implementation of VP/PBL in clinical medicine. Implementation phases of the activities aims at: 1) embedding the interactive VP design, and PBL processes into 4 clinical attachments in participating institutions, 2) implementation of the selected ICT platform for authoring and delivering VP/PBL cases. The target groups at the level of participating institutions as well as at the level of the whole MEFANET network are addressed at annual MEFANET 2014, 2015 conferences. CROESUS addresses also a wider audience on the European level – at other two multiplier events organized as workshops parallel to well-recognized events of European medical education community (AMEE 2015, ICVP 2016). The CROESUS’ added values for medical students and clinical teachers follow. 1) VP/PBL will provide effective learning experiences that are attractive and motivating for learners. 2) Collaborative learning experiences such as PBL will develop partnerships between educators, learners and employers. The interactive VPs delivered by CROESUS will train the correct way to carry out a task, but also what happens when mistakes are made, in safe on-line settings. 3) Academic staff at participant institutions will be trained and new trainers, available for the professional development of staff in the whole MEFANET network, will become available. 4) VP/PBL cases delivered by CROESUS will widen the set of open educational resources available. 5) Until now, the most VPs available are in English language. CROESUS will deliver a new set of these educational resources in Czech and Slovak languages. CROESUS’ tools and approaches concerning medical education and learning are of critical importance for the whole European community. Information that will be derived from the planned surveys and proposed assessment studies will provide the potential of analysis of changes in students‘ learning and performance when approached by scenario-based learning.
Education for clinical practice is a complex process, involving the development of a body of knowledge, skills and multiple aspects of professionalism. The traditional approaches, with modules in single discipline biosciences, bear little relationship to eventual learner needs for clinical practice. Practitioners act by synthesizing a range of relevant information, identifying and testing solutions. Developing competence in this crucial process requires an approach that differs from traditional teaching, where students are recipients of information. Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is one example of widespread form of learning which uses patient simulation to create a learning style close to the needs of practice. Virtual patients (VPs) are encouraging students to use their knowledge base to explore simple management decisions as they work through patient scenarios. The CROSESUS project has introduced innovative pedagogy methods using scenario-based learning tools, virtual cases and patients, and thus has enabled future physicians and healthcare professionals to simulate important steps in the diagnostic and therapeutic process before exposure to patients. CROESUS has transferred know-how and best practices from the institutions which have already gone through a successful implementation of authentic, motivating, competency-based learning styles into the medical curriculum, and linked it with the existing regional medical education network MEFANET (Czech/Slovak) as well as with other European projects with similar objectives. The project partnership has been based upon long-standing collaborations and awareness of each other’s work, and shared research interests between three institutions: (1) Institute of Biostatistics and Analysis at Masaryk University (Czechia), (2) Department of Medical education at St George's University of London (United Kingdom) and (3) Faculty of Medicine at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice (Slovakia). CROESUS has trained academics to implement the VP/PBL methodology – the training focused on how to create the VPs using OpenLabyrinth software, on how to construct the narrative and options within a VP, and on how to facilitate PBL sessions appropriately for student groups. The project has delivered two substantial intellectual outputs: (1) Guidelines on virtual patients and problem-based learning and (2) IT platform for scenario-based learning. The first one represents the methodology & guidelines on the use of VPs in PBL sessions. It includes useful tips on authoring VPs and their proper use for supporting medical students in developing their clinical reasoning and decision making skills. The second one – the IT platform for authoring and playing VPs – was selected based on the results from several surveys and a scoping review. The IT platform is available together with a set of 14 VPs, which can be used to enrich curricula of 10 clinical disciplines: (1) Radiology and Imaging, (2) Dentistry, (3) Ophthalmology and Optometry, (4) Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, (5) Psychiatry, Psychology, Sexology, (6) General Practice Medicine, (7) Paediatrics, Neonatology, (8) Internal Medicine, (9) Surgery, Traumatology and Orthopaedics, (10) Infectology. This set of VPs is available on-line (at the CROESUS’ website) as well as offline through XML-formatted files storing information according to the MedBiquitous Virtual Patient Data Standard (ANSI norm), which is suitable to share or exchange the patient cases between different institutions. The academic networks, such as MEFANET or ePBLnet, were hit by the CROESUS outputs during its dissemination events and with the published material. CROESUS is already having a substantial impact on new projects which have come out from these networks – the particular results from CROESUS’ surveys, methodologies as well as from the set of developed VPs are being used as foundation stones in building new programs towards medical curriculum innovations. Other stakeholders, such as institutions and people involved in health care, can benefit from the CROESUS outputs by improving the care for patients with a particular impact on patient safety. These are expected improvements, which may come from medicine and healthcare professionals who have been better prepared for developing clinical competency, and whose clinical competency has been better demonstrated and therefore assessed through the use of authentic virtual patients.