By Sam Blanchard Health Reporter For Mailonline
Published: 15:24 GMT, 1 March 2019 | Updated: 15:25 GMT, 1 March 2019
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A nerve-racking game has given an insight into a day in the life of staff in an NHS accident and emergency department.
The interactive role-play game Crisis Point: A Day in A&E lets people take on the roles of different staff in the hospital and react to common scenarios.
As you progress through the day patients begin to build up in the waiting room, the hospital's crisis level rises and the clock runs down as you try to clear your workload.
Created with the help of working NHS staff, the game aims to give people an insight into the difficult decisions and juggling acts health workers face every day and night.
It comes at a time when A&E departments across England are becoming more clogged up than ever and leaving thousands of patients facing long waits to see a doctor.
As you progress through the game you must make the decisions of different members of staff – various types of nurses and doctors – to determine which patients to spend more time treating and which ones to send home
Crisis Point: A Day in A&E is a game based on a series of situations in which you make the decisions of a senior sister, staff nurse, senior charge nurse, junior doctor or consultant.
In one scenario you have to decide whether or not to order a CT scan for a man in his 20s who had a bleeding head injury and says he feels dizzy and has vomited.
If you order the scan you may be using up extra resources for something which turns out to be minor, or you could spend more time monitoring his symptoms, meaning he could take up a bed in the emergency department until he feels better.
Each decision you make increases or relieves pressure on the hospital and, at the end of each section, you are given a crisis rating based on the NHS's own OPEL system which ranges from level zero to level three.
The aim is to make it to the end of the working day with the lowest crisis rating you can manage – L0 means the department is operating within Government targets, while L3, a critical rating, means patient safety is in danger.
Medical negligence solicitors Bolt Burdon Kemp created the game to highlight pressure on the NHS as recent figures show A&E departments are bursting at the seams across the country.
Figures released
