Medical Mystery: A Novel Student-led Immersive Roleplay for Medical Education at Scale

Roleplays are used in medical education to provide trainees with a safe environment for developing and improving their skills. Roleplays have traditionally been designed and facilitated by clinicians and educators. This study investigates the feasibility and scalability of a novel, student-led immersive roleplay (IR).

Two IRs were created by a team of medical students, focusing on patient-doctor partnership in managing ethically complex clinical cases. The roleplays were available to medical students from all year levels in an Australian medical school as part of its annual student conference. Each roleplay ran for 1 hour, and students were tasked with achieving their roles' agenda. Students' self-reported confidence in clinical skills and medical knowledge was surveyed on a 5-point Likert Scale before and after the roleplays, which were compared using the Wilcoxon ranked-sum test. Qualitative feedback was also collected in the post-roleplay survey.

A total of 421 medical students took part in 4 roleplay sessions, each with 5 facilitators. The roleplays ran smoothly with a participant-to-facilitator ratio of 20:1. Of the attendees, 267 completed the pre-roleplay survey, and 193 completed the post-roleplay survey. Both roleplays demonstrated improvement in students' self-reported medical knowledge. Themes that emerged from student feedback included realistic simulation of patient-doctor partnership, interaction and collaboration, exploration of medical knowledge, and the desire for longer roleplay duration.

The IR proved to be a feasible and scalable way to facilitate peer-assisted experiential learning of patient-doctor partnerships amidst ethical complexity.