Using simulated digital role plays to teach healthcare ‘soft skills’

Training deficits in ‘soft skills’ - personal or non-technical skills - have long been lamented by educators and employers despite longstanding evidence of their importance. Virtual environments, combined with online learning management and reporting platforms, offer potential for addressing this gap through affordable and scalable simulations. This paper aims to summarise virtual ‘soft skills’ work undertaken to date, and to explore practical issues encountered by development teams working in this area. The first section provides historical overviews of the ‘soft skills’ term and related digital training initiatives. This is followed by a case study of an interdisciplinary team of Australian software developers, researchers and educators who have built a series of virtual healthcare products. The case study reports on a number of challenges encountered by the team.