The effectiveness of serious games in healthcare education: An umbrella review.

BACKGROUND: Serious games (SGs) use game-based principles seen in entertaining games but for an educational purpose. The integration of SGs into health profession education has gained increasing attention to enhance learning outcomes and prepare students for clinical practice. SGs provide students with a realistic clinical experience in assessing data, making clinical decisions and experiencing the consequences of their decisions in a safe environment. However, studies with health professions students tend to focus primarily on short-term knowledge outcomes, with limited attention to other essential competencies such as skills, self-confidence, motivation, and patient-related outcomes. Consequently, the effectiveness of SGs in health profession education and their impact on patient outcomes remains unclear. These limitations highlight the need for an umbrella review to synthesise the existing systematic reviews and provide a clearer understanding of the overall impact of SGs in health professions education in terms of clinical preparedness and patient care outcomes.

METHODS: This umbrella review followed the current Cochrane guidance on 'Overview of Reviews' and used the JBI methodology to conduct the review and the Preferred Reporting Items for Overviews of Reviews (PRIOR) guidelines to report the findings. Five electronic databases were searched for systematic reviews published in English, search conducted between March 2024 and December 2025. Screening, and quality assessment were conducted by two independent reviewers. This umbrella review is registered on PROSPERO (#CRD42024547269).

RESULTS: Twenty-seven systematic reviews, covering 395 primary studies, were included. Out of 27 reviews a total of 20 concentrated on nursing students. SGs as an educational method can improve knowledge, psychomotor skills, cognitive skills and confidence in clinical skills. When compared with other teaching approaches, SGs were at least as effective as traditional education method and in the high-quality reviews were more effective. The effectiveness of SGs appears to be influenced by intervention characteristics such as duration, study design, and game content.

CONCLUSION: This umbrella review supports the positive impact of SGs as educational methods for health professions students. SGs particularly DSGs significantly enhance student knowledge, procedural skills, cognitive skills and confidence, with the strongest evidence found in nursing education. It is recommended that SGs be integrated into blended learning approaches alongside traditional clinical training. Future research should focus on conducting rigorous, long-term studies, with particular attention to motivation, self-efficacy, and patient-related outcomes.