Playing In Context: A Co-Designed Game With Medical Students On Vulnerability And Health

Date: 23 October, Friday | Time: 16:00 - 17:30 | Venue: Academia Room, L1-S4

Speakers: Dr Pauline Luk, Dr Ria Sinha

Programme Synopsis: 

Health inequalities are often taught through abstract frameworks and statistics. Such approaches may fail to convey how context—poverty, migration status, family obligations, stigma, policy environments, and time scarcity—shapes everyday health decisions for vulnerable populations. Learners may “know” social determinants of health (SDH), yet still struggle to understand what it feels like to navigate illness and wellbeing within constrained social worlds.

This interactive workshop uses an experiential, narrative‑based game to invite participants into the lived contexts of people experiencing social and structural disadvantage. Drawing on community‑informed scenarios, participants step into roles of vulnerable individuals and families, making health, financial, and social decisions under realistic constraints. Through gameplay, participants experience how limited choices, competing priorities, and structural barriers accumulate across time, shaping health outcomes beyond clinical encounters.

The workshop foregrounds contextual reasoning rather than problem‑solving. Participants are encouraged to notice moments of frustration, moral distress, empathy, judgement, and uncertainty—and to examine what these responses reveal about assumptions embedded in healthcare training. Facilitated reflection surfaces how policies, institutions, and social norms interact with individual agency, and how vulnerability is often produced by systems rather than personal failure.

In the second half of the workshop, facilitators unpack the co‑design process behind the game, highlighting how collaboration with medical students functioned not only as a design strategy but also as a powerful learning experience. Participants then discuss how experiential approaches—such as games and narrative‑based activities—can be adapted and embedded within medical humanities and health professions curricula to foster contextual reasoning, equity‑oriented thinking, and compassionate care.

A promotion video of the game is available here for preview:

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to achieve the following learning outcomes:

1. Experience and articulate how constrained choices and competing life demands influence health‑related decisions for vulnerable populations.
2. Reflect critically on emotional responses, assumptions, and implicit biases that arise when engaging with vulnerability.
3. Apply experiential and game‑based strategies to design or adapt learning activities that foreground context and lived experience in their own educational settings.

The effectiveness will be measured through informal qualitative discussions.

Target Audience

• Medical and health professions educators
• Medical humanities scholars and teachers
• Curriculum designers and faculty leads for professionalism, ethics, or health equity
• Residents, senior students, or trainees involved in teaching or facilitation
• Educators interested in experiential learning, narrative approaches, or social justice in healthcare

Maximum Number of Participants

32 participants (in any multiple of 4-5 people in a group)