VICTEAMS: A Virtual Environment to Train Medical Team Leaders to Interact with Virtual Subordinates

Health care delivery in military conflict, in peacekeeping missions or in the aftermath of disaster, implies high stress environments with danger exposures, life-threatening events and high levels of work demand. Crisis and emergency risk communication remains a real challenge. The rapid response of emergency medical teams has an important role to play in preventing serious adverse events. During critical events, medical errors can be related to human or system factors, including ineffective team leadership, non-standardized team communication, a lack of global situation awareness, poor use of resources and inappropriate triage and prioritization. The VICTEAMS project aims at building a virtual environment for training rescue team leaders to non-technical skills. Depending on the leader abilities, the virtual characters playing the subordinates (e.g. nurses) reproduce a variety of behaviors like erroneous actions, followership attitudes or stress-based behaviors. A pedagogical director tailors the difficulty according to the dynamic profile of the learner.