Virtual patient scenarios should encompass acute illnesses, emergencies, invasive procedures, and infectious diseases to broaden empathy development across diverse clinical settings¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 2 claims (2 for) · 2 studies (1 review, 1 qualitative), q2 · 0 of 2 report an effect size · 2 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The review recommends expanding scenario diversity beyond the psychiatric and chronic conditions that dominated included studies. It argues that virtual patients "provide a safe and flexible educational environment for learning about rare, severe, and high-risk clinical situations that are difficult to encounter during standard clinical training" and that it is essential to develop scenarios covering acute and high-risk contexts. This addresses the gap that severe infections, rare diseases, and acute conditions were not represented.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Virtual patient scenarios must be developed that encompass a broader range of acute illnesses, emergencies, invasive procedures, and infectious diseases

Constraints¶

• The review notes that in acute or emergency situations, medical students tend to prioritise clinical reasoning over empathic engagement

Target Learners¶

• undergraduate medical students

Target Learning Goals¶

• clinical empathy across diverse clinical settings

Claims¶

• Virtual patient scenarios focused on psychiatric and chronic diseases, with major depressive disorder and cancer most common; acute, infectious, and rare conditions were absent [+W]
• Nursing students express needs for optimized VS technology and cases: more diverse scenarios, greater realism, multilingual support, flexible training content, and culturally contextualized cases [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Design and implement VS teaching with simplified interfaces, multimodal feedback, multilingual diverse case libraries, pre-training, and controlled VR session lengths

Examples¶

-

Key Sources¶

• Yamada Rie, Futakawa Kaori, Kondo Satoshi, Xu Kuangzhe, Okazaki Satoshi. (2025). A scoping review on the use of virtual patients for enhancing empathy in medical students. Medical Education Online. https://doi.org/10.1080/10872981.2025.2607825