Using AI-generated videos to encourage reflective discussion when dealing with aggressive patients

Dr Carl Heffernan, Lecturer practitioner for Physician Associate studies in BU’s Health And Social Sciences faculties, shares his thoughts on the use of AI in teaching and learning at BU:

Working in healthcare, at some point, we will sadly encounter aggressive patients. Teaching communication skills in this area can be emotive and challenging. An essential tool is a reflective discussion using cases to bring experience and ideas from a diverse group.

During a professional development day, BU recently hosted some foundation year two doctors from across Dorset. As part of this, we created 4 AI-generated videos to help with discussions based on real cases. These were

• An angry relative due to a lack of updates
• An angry patient due to a delay in medications
•  An angry patient due to day surgery being cancelled
• An angry patient who is racist towards staff

These were played and stopped at various points to ask how they would and how they should handle the situation. This provided deep, meaningful reflective discussions around the topics, and an interesting observation was how there was a lack of knowledge on local reporting systems. Another observation was how the introverted students engaged more in the discussion. Overall, there was a good discussion about strategies for handling these situations from the students rather than the facilitators.

Feedback from 62 doctors from the session was positive, with general themes ranging from being thought-provoking and engaging to helpful and wanting more. Negative comments were mainly about the pauses being too long due to user design rather than the technology. Another negative was that some voices didn’t match the AI avatar.

AI-generated videos are quick to set up yet can fulfil a whole session, making them worthwhile. More experience is needed to develop this, but there was a clear benefit from this small cohort.

Click the image to see an example video:

Dr Carl Heffernan, LP for Physicians Associate Programme, HSS