Gaming Simulation as Health and Safety Training for Home Health Care Workers

• Participatory design processes were applied to the design of a virtual simulation training system to create a naturalistic, engaging, and informative training environment for home health care professionals.
• The virtual simulations developed through this process offer opportunities to provide health and safety training that uses an active learning process that incorporates immediate feedback on task performance and decision-making.
• The virtual simulation training system supports critical thinking, decision-making, and risk analysis for home health care professionals.

BackgroundThe demand for home health care services is rapidly increasing and is driving a need for additional trained home health care professionals (HHPs). HHPs need effective training for managing personal health and safety hazards encountered when providing health care services in the home environment. The purpose of this article was to describe the process used for developing and evaluating an interactive virtual simulation training system (VSTS) to educate HHP.SampleSixty-eight HHPs, including nurses, home health aides, occupational and physical therapists, administrators, and health and safety educators, participated in the study.MethodsA mixed methods design that included an interdisciplinary, participatory design methodology was used to develop a VSTS to train HHP to identify and manage health and safety hazards in the home using a gaming simulation learning approach.ResultsThis approach has yielded a training package that includes modules addressing electrical and fire hazards; environmental hazards; and lift, slip, and trip hazards routinely encountered by HHP.ConclusionsParticipatory methods are a useful and effective way to design a VSTS that is interactive, engaging, and informative.