Criticality: The experience of developing an interactive educational tool based on board games

SummaryCritical care services have seen many changes over recent years prompted by the seminal paper by the Department of Health (2000) Comprehensive critical care: A review of adult critical care services. This led to the expansion of critical care services with the resultant recruitment of large numbers of nurses new to critical care. Northumbria and other Universities within the UK were commissioned to provide formal education to critical care nurses and developed Foundations in Acute and Critical Care Module to provide nurses new to critical care, or from other acute clinical settings, with the knowledge and skills to manage this complex group of patients. The aim of this paper is to share the authors' experience of developing “Criticality” a board game designed to formatively assess learning amongst critical care nurses following a formal taught module in a Higher Education Institution (HEI) and prior to the summative assessment. Author experience suggests that Criticality is a useful revision tool and also fun and interactive which helped the students to identify strengths and weaknesses in their knowledge base and thus direct their revision prior to summative assessment.