By: Vincent Chan, MD
The Inklings of an Idea
“If you’ve ever wanted to step into the shoes of a doctor saving lives in the ICU, Critical Care offers that experience.” – Stuti Steth, Ubyssey
In my experiences as an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) physician, I often wish my patients and families understood more about the role of intensive care before they even set foot into the unit. However, medicine is currently fraught with disinformation, and patients are more skeptical of the legitimacy of healthcare than ever, creating confusion in public between fact and fiction. Unfortunately, this can leave people with a poor impression of what a truly collaborative environment in healthcare is like. We need effective ways to teach patients to partner with providers to overcome the challenges posed by disinformation and make the care we offer as transparent and accessible as we can.
With this in mind, I wanted to participate in a project that would educate the public about the ICU while supporting providers is building patient relationships, and what better way to do that than with a collaborative board game that can be played by patients and providers alike. I met my co-designer, Lakshman Swamy, MD, through X (formerly Twitter), and we quickly recognized that we shared both common objectives and a love of board games. Since that initial meeting, we created a board game to simplify the who’s and the what’s of an ICU and hopefully demystifying critical care for the general public while inspiring a future generation of providers into loving what we do.
When Medicine Meets a Card Game
“There’s a delicious tense feeling throughout the game…And the cooperative gameplay feels natural; you need all patients to get better to win, but you’re the advocate for what your own patient needs.” – Emily Larkins, game designer
Critical Care: The Game is a co-operative board game grounded in medicine but adapted and simplified for the public to also learn about the complexities and interactions in an Intensive Care Unit. The medicine is real, and the interactions, the discussions, and details are the lived experiences for many who practice in the ICU setting.
During the design phase, my co-designer and I spent countless hours attempting to simplify the medications and procedures we use on a day-to-day basis. Each card was an attempt to balance realism with palatability as we wrote definitions for medical terms in plain language. We wanted to teach the world what we do, but to confine a whole person, procedure or medication to a small card was an immense challenge, and a valuable exercise in honing our ability to make complex topics digestible.
Beyond the descriptions themselves, we wanted the interactions and consequences to feel real, whether that’s a procedure that could cause complications without point-of-care ultrasound, or the impact of a medication, like such as “Beta Blockers” for “A-Fib”. However, we quickly realize that if we were to lean into realism and include all potential interactions, the game would become too complex for those naïve to healthcare; however, we still wanted it to be true enough to feel accurate to our colleagues.
Beyond the medications and procedures, we also wanted to celebrate with all our ICU colleagues. We designed specific cards for all sorts of team members beyond physicians and nurses who make the ICU run, including “Case Manager”, “Social Worker”, “Chaplain” and “Environmental Services”, to name just a few. In addition, to incorporate another important care team in the ICU, we designed a palliative care track component, in which you could potentially send patients to hospice. We designed the palliative care aspect to be considered an additional win condition for the patient because we want to celebrate that end of life in a dignified, comfortable manner can be as much of a win as curing illness itself. We designed many cards that address this important topic ranging from code status, palliative care medications, and palliative care support staff and gave these cards this amazing power to help a patient “win the game”.
Looking to the Future
“My dream is to see families playing this game and starting conversations around the coffee table about health and healthcare, about clinical careers. It is a real dream of mine that people play Critical Care and are inspired to become doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists.” – Lakshman Swamy, MD, Critical Care The Game Co-Designer
We hope that this game can provide education to the public, while supporting providers in learning how to maintain those important patient partnerships, and we hope that all who play the game will find education and laughter. We hope that this project inspires creativity in others about how we can fight off the amount of distrust and build trusting relationships with our patients. We love what we do, we believe in what we do, and hopefully with one game at a time, we can inspire a whole future generation of healthcare workers.
Photo curtsey of Istock
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