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Practical experience is crucial in pharmacy education, but it can be difficult to provide pharmacy students with a sufficient level of experience during their education due to a number of challenges. Video games might provide a platform where students can gain positive learning experience in a virtual environment. Serious games have been used successfully across many industries, which suggest that a well-designed serious game can have positive learning outcomes. Increased engagement and motivation are mentioned by experts as some of the main benefits of serious games. Being able to practise skills before utilising them in real-world scenarios is another advantage identified. In this paper, we present a virtual patient simulator which is designed specifically teaching pharmacy students patient communication and administration of drugs. A pilot study and an expert review were carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the application and its findings are presented.

The purpose of this work is to contribute to the design and development of a virtual university hospital as a place for educational activities. The findings presented in this paper are based on two exploratory studies using a virtual operating room with both medical and non-medical participants. The room was designed to recreate a real one at St. Olav's university hospital in Trondheim, Norway. The first participant category was represented by surgical and anesthesia postgraduate nursing students who conducted role-play of realistic and relevant scenarios in the virtual operating room. The non-medical participants went on a virtual guided tour around in the same operating room. Both participant groups provided suggestions for further development of the virtual hospital. We have also investigated the use of the Oculus Rift, a head mounted display, as a way of enhancing the immersion at the virtual operating room. The paper highlights and discusses the most important findings, with suggestions of future work.

A three-dimensional (3D) virtual hospital can be used as the interaction platform for medical staff and patients, introducing operating rules and enhancing work efficiency. A 3D virtual hospital system was constructed based on VRML, and the system can be accessed via the Web. The virtual system was constructed according to the School Hospital of Central South University. The constituent parts of the system, such as the door into the hall, CT room, and automatic floor, were designed. The method of introducing models into the virtual system and scene interaction methods was through analysis. The 3D virtual hospital system can be navigated through the Internet, and bring convenience to medical staff and patients.

One of the problems faced by an organisation participating in a virtual enterprise is how to specify internal and external aspects of the organisation in terms of the organisational roles involved and policies applicable to the roles. Another problem is how to manage such a virtual organisation and guarantee that its operations are in agreement with the specification. We present two role-based approaches that address these problems. The first approach is based on the RMODP framework and can be used to specify structure and interactions in a virtual enterprise. The second approach was initially aimed at managing large distributed systems, but can also be used to specify and implement roles and policies relating to a virtual enterprise. We analyse the relationships between these two approaches and illustrate how they can be applied by means of a simplified virtual hospital example.