A Serious Logistical Game of Paediatric Emergency Medicine: Proposed Scoring Mechanism and Pilot Test

Outcomes of care for various diseases and urgent conditions in an emergency department are dependent on balancing the patient’s need and available resources through management and coordination under often rapidly changing preconditions. However, although it is central to resilient operations, decision-making in dynamic resource management is rarely visible to managers. Sometimes the identification of successful strategies is apparent only through adverse event reports. A simulation game could be helpful for the acquisition of non-technical skills in addressing operational conundrums that could threaten the defence ability of a paediatric emergency department under care production pressures. This contribution presents a Sandtable serious logistical game of the care production system and, in particular, proposes its scoring mechanism, which was tested in a set of logistical experiments. The results show that through gamification, participants were challenged in terms of their intrinsic self-interest when it came to approaching the work. More importantly, the proposed extrinsic reward system allows all parallel functional roles to be equally rewarded as the game evolves. Anticipatory human resource management is identified as a successful strategy for achieving a sustainable working environment if the organizational resilience is confronted with patient inflow surges during the busiest hours of the busiest day.