4 Must-Try Roleplays for Healthcare Teams to Improve Health Outcomes

Taking advantage of roleplays for healthcare teams as an enablement tool can not only improve patient interactions but also health outcomes for those patients. 

In our beginner-friendly guide, we’ll give you everything there is to know about this type of roleplay training, including why they’re beneficial, how to design successful roleplay situations, and specific scenarios to explore with your team. 

Why Roleplays for Healthcare Teams Can Be a Gamechanger  

Healthcare roles represent some of the most important jobs on the planet, and for good reason. Many positions in healthcare require years of training on top of intensive schooling. However, once you enter the healthcare field, enablement and training can slow. 

That’s where roleplays for healthcare teams come in. Roleplaying is a great enablement tool for any industry, but especially in industries where the core skills and abilities needed to succeed are hard to practice using traditional training methods. Here are some of the top reasons why you should consider implementing roleplays for your healthcare employees. 

Building empathy for the next generation of healthcare professionals

Empathy and empathetic listening has always been a challenge for folks in the healthcare field. Part of this challenge is that empathy and compassion haven’t been prioritized in healthcare and medical training. Enter, roleplay. 

With targeted roleplay scenarios, healthcare professionals can engage in scenarios where they practice empathy and compassion. For example, delivering life-altering diagnostic news — like a cancer diagnosis — to a patient is a situation where medical professionals can improve patient interactions. These types of simulated scenarios can help medical professionals better communicate with patients and their family while also redesigning the care process with empathy in mind. 

Improving communication among teams

Effective cross-team communication is essential in any healthcare setting, whether that’s urgent care centers, hospitals, nursing homes, or similar environments. Not surprisingly, roleplaying is an efficient way to sharpen communication skills like active listening and clear, professional communication. Healthcare professionals can also leverage this type of training to improve their interactions with patients, too. 

Making more informed, high-stakes decisions in patient care

Although not all healthcare professionals face situations where they need to make high-stakes decisions in little time, it’s a scenario that many workers in the medical space experience. Making critical decisions that have a lasting outcome under pressure isn’t a skill that’s easy to practice without simulations like roleplay. 

Getting experience making these kinds of decisions in a no-risk environment means healthcare professionals are free to make mistakes and learn from them as they gain experience.

There are so many use cases of roleplays for healthcare teams and the benefits can transform the way your medical teams interact with patients and each other.

Designing Effective Roleplays for Healthcare Teams

If you’re considering implementing roleplays for healthcare teams, it’s essential to make sure you design effective simulations. The idea is to simulate real-life scenarios that healthcare workers can prepare for and anticipate. In other words, if your roleplays aren’t realistic or involve scenarios that would never happen, they’re less useful. 

Here are some key things to keep in mind when you’re first learning to design effective roleplays for healthcare teams.

Reflecting real-world challenges and realistic scenarios 

First and foremost, prioritize creating roleplays for healthcare teams that actually reflect real-world situations and challenges. Consider your team and what situations they deal with on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. 

Roleplay scenarios that make sense for one team might not make sense for another. For example, the situations emergency room doctors need to respond to might not resonate with a team who primarily works in elderly care.  

Including both soft and technical skills training

When designing roleplays for healthcare teams, some team leads fail to consider soft skills. Both technical and soft skills are essential for folks working in the medical space so it’s important for team leads to aim to design roleplays that encompass both of these areas.

Marrying both soft and technical skills can take your team’s abilities to the next level. For example, you might incorporate some roleplays that focus on technical training, like understanding HIPAA compliance, electronic medical record (EMR) knowledge, and harm reduction. However, you can pair these types of scenarios with soft skills training that hones skills like critical thinking, adaptability skills, emotional intelligence, and teamwork. 

Leveraging feedback from healthcare professionals 

One of the best ways to get to the heart of what your team needs to work on most is by asking them directly. Using one-on-one interviews or even anonymous surveys distributed to the team, ask what situations are most challenging in their position and what they’d like to be more prepared for in the future. This can generate some ideas for realistic scenarios you’ll want to emulate to give your team the best chance of success. 

How to Design Roleplays for Healthcare Teams Through Yoodli

When it comes to designing effective roleplays for healthcare teams, AI roleplay is an incredibly powerful tool, and there’s no better option than Yoodli.

Yoodli is a roleplay platform and communication coach that leverages artificial intelligence to provide the most realistic roleplays for folks to improve their abilities. Although it’s perfect for roleplays for healthcare teams, folks can use Yoodli for any kind of training and enablement. Companies like Google, Dale Carnegie, and Korn Ferry have all used this tool for scalable certification and training.

Anyone can explore Yoodli’s extensive library of existing roleplay scenarios, from skills training and performance review simulations to sales roleplays and everything in between. However, Yoodli’s Builder tool allows people to ideate and design their own specific roleplays, like roleplays for healthcare teams. 

Interacting with your AI partner

After designing a roleplay scenario, users will interact with an AI-generated partner to engage in back-and-forth banter, just like typical human conversation. Not only that, but users can also customize their AI partner’s personality to make the roleplay even more lifelike. When you work in a healthcare setting like a hospital, for example, the folks you interact with aren’t always going to be happy and eager to chat. Chances are, they might be stressed, frustrated, or scared. Practicing interactions with an AI partner through Yoodli helps healthcare teams anticipate more realistic reactions and know how to best respond. 

After your employees finish their roleplay, they’ll get an in-depth report that contains data points and specific insights around their listening, delivery, and speaking patterns. Using that data, Yoodli offers your team actionable feedback so they can improve in their weakest areas.

No matter what medical environment your team works in, you can start leveraging roleplays for healthcare teams for free at https://yoodli.ai/ to improve your team’s abilities. 

4 Must-Try Scenarios for Roleplays for Healthcare Teams 

If you need some inspiration for realistic roleplays to get you started, you’re in the right place. Here are four must-try scenarios to explore through roleplay for your healthcare team.

1. Mitigating errors or mistakes in patient care

Although nobody wants to experience it, making errors or mistakes in patient care happens, and it’s important to know what to do if it happens under your watch. 

In this scenario, have your team imagine they accidentally misspeak and misdiagnose a patient with a chronic condition. The roleplay will revolve around what actions they need to take to mitigate the medical mistake. 

The “right” course of action will depend on the environment, the employer, and other factors, but in general, you can run your team through what your employer expects if they make this type of mistake. 

2. Learning to handle critical conversations

Having critical conversations is an everyday occurrence in many areas of the healthcare sphere. To best prepare your team, imagine a situation where they need to deliver difficult news to a patient, like a poor diagnosis. Have your healthcare workers focus on leveraging empathy, sensitivity, and professionalism to deliver the news. It’s a good opportunity to practice specific methods for delivering bad news, like SPIKES (e.g., setting, perception/perspective, invitation, knowledge, empathy/emotion, summary/strategy) or another appropriate technique. 

This is also a great scenario for improving emotional intelligence and effective communication skills. 

3. Navigating challenging patient or family interactions

Similarly, learning how to effectively navigate challenging family interactions is another great example of roleplays for healthcare teams that can improve your team’s interactions. 

For example, consider a situation where your team needs to work with a patient who needs medical care but is nervous, noncompliant, or wary of medical professionals. During this scenario, healthcare employees can work on de-escalation techniques for upset patients while also building their ability to actively listen and empathize with them. It’s a great way to have your team practice reduce conflict and improve patient interactions and satisfaction.

4. Remaining calm in high-pressure or emergency situations

Most healthcare settings have seen emergency or high-pressure situations, and it’s critical to prepare teams for this eventuality. Consider a scenario where there’s a relevant emergency (the exact type can be dependent on your team’s typical responsibilities), such as a patient going into cardiac arrest. Guide your team through this situation using the appropriate protocols to help simulate real-life, high-pressure situations. 

These types of situations can help your team perform better under stress while also improving outcomes for the patient. 

Measuring the Effectiveness of Roleplays for Healthcare Teams

With the return on investment or ROI of roleplays, the most relevant metrics used to measure success and effectiveness depends on your team and their objectives. What works for one team in one setting might not be the best for another team. However, here are a few potential ways you can measure the effectiveness of roleplays for healthcare teams. 

Error reduction rates

One metric worth exploring after implementing roleplays for healthcare teams is error reduction rates. Although making mistakes in healthcare happens, it’s certainly not the goal. 

As such, team leads can take a look at error reduction rates to see how often mistakes are made during certain processes (like patient handoffs, medication administration, or medical protocols) and the exact types of errors. Comparing the errors made before implementing roleplay training versus after can shed light on how roleplays for healthcare teams impacted error reduction. 

Response time

In medical spaces, response time is everything. Oftentimes, healthcare professionals need to respond as quickly as possible to minimize harm to the patient. In this case, team leads can measure employees’ response time to respond to simulated emergencies before and after trainings to see what kind of impact roleplays for healthcare teams had on their rates. Team leads can also evaluate how long it takes their team to complete specific processes. The goal would be to look for improvements in these rates. 

Employee retention rates and burnout

The healthcare industry houses some of the most high-stress roles out there. However, one of the benefits of roleplay is lower turnover rates and less burnout among medical professionals. Hopefully, after implementing roleplays for healthcare teams to improve both soft and technical skills, team leads will see positive change in employee retention rates and burnout cases.

Some employers prefer to get direct feedback from employees through anonymous surveys, too. 

The Main Takeaway 

Roleplays for healthcare teams can completely transform the way a team of medical professionals interact with each other and patients. Plus, when leveraging a tool like Yoodli, healthcare workers can anticipate and prepare for common situations to improve overall patient care and outcomes in a controlled, no-risk environment.

Sources

• Harvard Medical School: “Building Empathy into the Structure of Health Care.”
• AIMS Education: “17 Essential Skills for Healthcare Professionals.”
• AAFP: “Five Ways to Respond to a Medical Mistake.”