That’s the start of what will be the code for the top 100 most prescribed drugs by foundation doctors. To demonstrate the drugs coded so far it is set in A&E with just two patients who have both taken overdoses. You can examine the patients with the command “examine [patient]“. You can prescribe drugs using “prescribe [drug] to [patient]“. So far only 4 of the top 100 have been coded, which means I have just 96 to go! You’ll notice that you can’t prescribe anything orally until you stop your patient vomiting so perhaps an anti-emetic might be a good idea.

I suppose it would be harsh of me not to tell you which drugs have actually been coded… naloxone, acetyl cysteine, domperidone and activated charcoal should do wonders for your patients.

Interactive fiction (IF) is essentially a computerised version of those “Choose your own adventure” books you read as a kid, the sort that said things like:

You are in a forest, there are exits NORTH and SOUTH. Which way would you like to go?

NORTH go to page 135.

SOUTH go to page 71.

and then you would flick to that page but always keeping a finger in the page you came from just in case things went wrong. This loose structure can be found in problem based learning (PBL) which is the teaching style of choice at St George’s. The benefit of IF over the PBL/Choose your own adventure style writing is that the reader/player has to decide what to do, there might be hints at what to do next but the reader/player will never be presented with a binary decision like seen above and nor will the reader/player be presented with mutually exclusive choices – a personal dislike of the PBL system.

I’ll be writing this medical IF game/story using Inform 7, this uses a natural language syntax which means I can type in proper sentences to create the story and saves me the hassle of learning a proper coding language. Utilising the fantastic work done by the Parchment Project my creations will be playable in any web browser with Javascript support.  IF is a unique medium with its own strengths and weaknesses, IF is good at stories/games about props and settings, about investigation and exploration and about mechanics and systems. I could not think of a better medium for medical education.

For more information on IF, check out http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

Here is a case inspired by one of the PBL cases I had in first year. It is not very long at the moment but I hope to flesh it out over the next few days. In this case you have been sent a referred by her GP due to a history of severe diarrhoea and lethargy.

If you are unsure of what to do try asking Victoria about relevant topics – use the phrase “ask about” followed by a topic to see what she says.  It won’t take you very long to exhaust all the answers that she’s got but this is just a taster of what is possible.