The rationale
Why TRIAGED?
What it does that a case study can't.
Why not just use a case study?
Traditional case studies begin with a patient someone else has already written. Students analyse the information they are given.
That places students in the position of simply just receiving information. In practice, clinical risk emerges gradually and they need to learn to continually reconsider and reassess.
TRIAGED deliberately removes that certainty. Students do not know who they are going to meet, because the person does not exist yet. Each roll gives the group one constraint and asks them to decide what it means. Their initial judgements remain provisional, because the next piece of information may change everything.
A static case study
- The patient
- Already written by someone else
- The information
- All there from the start
- The students
- Receive and analyse it
- The judgement
- Made once, on a complete picture
TRIAGED
- The patient
- Does not exist until the group builds them
- The information
- Arrives one prompt at a time
- The students
- Decide what each prompt means
- The judgement
- Stays provisional, and is revisited as the picture changes
That uncertainty is the point.
Why work in teams?
Not because games are more fun in groups. The group is deliberately a learning resource.
Students arrive with uneven experience. TRIAGED makes those differences productive, because the team has to collectively build a person none of them knows in advance. Students pool their different placement experiences and perspectives to decide what each prompt might mean, for example:
- One student has worked inOlder adult care
- Another has encounteredCommunity care
- A third bringsForensic experience
None of them knows this patient in advance. All of them contribute to who they become.
Students in the original sessions recognised that they were learning from one another’s different placement experiences.
Ready to try it with your own students?
Running a session Roll the original set