Dr Rachel Ellaway from the Northern Ontario School of Medicine talks to eViP about the need for Virtual Patients when teaching Canadian students across different cultures, and even different time zones! Flexibility and variety are key for virtual patients, and they can even be taken out of the medical education context – are Virtual Patients for patients and virtual hospitals the future?
As Dr Ellaway says: “There’s hardly anything in medical healthcare where Virtual Patients don’t fit one way or another. It’s a case of understanding the users’ discourse, understanding, needs and requirements.”