Generation 4.5

The G4.5 Project | Project Team & Partners | Virtual Patient Cases | Useful Links | MedEdEthics App

Generation 4.5The Generation 4.5 project is a continuum project from the JISC funded Generation 4 project. The Generation 4 project successfully transformed the Problem-Based Learning scenarios in the transitional year of the Medicine course with interactive Virtual Patients (VP). The VP cases allowed students to take active patient management decisions and explore the consequences of their actions. This project uses the same principles to target the ethics community, whose teachers originate from a wide range of primary disciplines (e.g. law, philosophy, medicine).

Aim: The aim of the G4.5 Project is to embed VP cases into the Medical and Healthcare Ethics curricula and disseminate the G4 experience more widely to other disciplines.

Trial: VPs were trialled at St George’s within the Medical Ethics lectures through the iEthics project. The trial was a success and well received by the students. As a result more ethics VP
cases were created and enriched with video with the aim to evaluate their use for teaching
and learning in medical ethics curriculum nationally.

Generation 4.5Collaboration: The G4.5 project delivered five ethics VP cases to 19 Medical Schools within the UK. Each medical school trialled at least one VP case within their curriculum and evaluated the student and tutor feedback from this trial. The G4.5 project has been done in collaboration with Newcastle University, Sheffield University and University of Leeds.

The project also had 16 other medical schools within the UK to evaluate the use of at least one VP inside or out of a lecture setting.