Operating room games: the Safe Surgery Trainer for team communication

Safe Surgery Trainer, abbreviated SST, is a patient-safety game for perioperative staff: nurses, surgeons, anesthesia providers and scrub technicians. Perioperative care covers the three phases of surgery, before, during and after the operation, and its goal is better conditions for the patient in each one. Alion Science and Technology developed the game with Synensis Health, the University of Central Florida and IDEAS for the Office of Naval Research, and it was a finalist in the business category of the 2015 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge.

It was presented as the Navy's first patient-safety training game for medical teams involved in surgery. Among operating room games it set itself a narrow job: reinforce safety protocols and team performance through short virtual scenarios that busy, highly educated staff could finish without any training. Its stated promise was a significant change in behavior in just 30 minutes.

The player's challenge is to use effective communication techniques to move through perioperative scenarios, which builds an understanding of patient-safety communication protocols and of a psychologically safe operating room. The interface is simple, feedback is highly visible and sessions are short, borrowing mechanics from entertainment games. Situational judgment items measure progress against the correct behaviors, and feedback appears in real time throughout.

Players may make a small number of mistakes on each level. Success depends on the severity of the errors, the number of times the content has been taught and how far the player has progressed. Scores arrive immediately and are also collated for each perspective and in total. The game runs on a variety of platforms and could be freely distributed within the military health system.

The websites of both developers, alionscience.com and synensishealth.com, no longer lead to a site, and no replacement official page for Safe Surgery Trainer turned up in November 2026.

The game's training results are not repeated here. Published claims about the game's effect on safety knowledge and communication come from project material, and no primary medical source for them could be opened. Readers who need evidence on game-based surgical training will find published trials more useful than developer summaries.