Abstract
Effective team building and leadership are crucial in running an effective and safe healthcare system with improved patient care and clinical outcomes. Currently, there is a great demand for formal leadership training throughout the extensive medical education curriculum. We constructed an interactive team-building activity utilizing gamification-theory with the Zoom game. The Zoom activity requires a team of learners to organize a set of sequential images, each of which contains a “zoomed out” section from the previous image, into the correct order within a set time frame. Given the unique and approachable nature of this team-based activity, we propose the following: 1) to introduce the Zoom game as a team-building and communication fostering exercise in undergraduate medical education and 2) to assess baseline teamwork skills of first-year medical students through an immersive gaming experience. With this in mind, 260 first-year medical students (class of 2020) at an urban-city medical school were enrolled in the Zoom Team Building Activity as part of their orientation. The students were randomly assigned to 11 teams, comprising 23-24 students and two faculty facilitators per team and completed the activity in the allotted time frame. The average time to complete the Zoom game was 24 minutes, and all the teams successfully placed the pictures in the correct order. Facilitators noted that the Zoom game strongly encouraged friendly interactions, intercollegiate high values, mutual respect, confidence, and trust among each other. Students observed take-home points such as selecting a leader, designating specific roles, and encouraging closed-loop communication. Overall, the Zoom activity game is an interactive, fun, and easily accessible team-building and communication fostering exercise in undergraduate medical education. Further studies on the Zoom game exercise would be essential to determine whether it has a continuous and enduring effect on developing team building among medical students.
Highlights
Team building and leadership are two critical features in running an effective and safe healthcare system
Given the unique and approachable nature of this team-based activity, we propose the following: 1) to introduce the Zoom game as a team-building and communication fostering exercise in undergraduate medical education and 2) to assess baseline teamwork skills of first-year medical students through an immersive gaming experience
Comments captured from the Jefferson Teamwork Observation Guide (JTOG) for first-year medical students were evaluated through open-axial qualitative analysis performed by the authors, who have extensive experience with qualitative research (Table 2)
Summary
Team building and leadership are two critical features in running an effective and safe healthcare system. Studies have indicated that effective leadership correlates with improved patient care and clinical outcomes [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Despite robust scientific literature supporting the importance of effective teamwork and leadership in promoting student learning, healthcare performances, and improved patient outcomes, there is still a great demand for formal. A review of team building and leadership training suggests that retreats and other forms of dedicated leadership exercises have been shown to engage the learners and simultaneously improve leadership and teamwork skills [10,11]
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