What happens when nurses, who are global health experts, and social scientists, and game designers/software developers come together to tackle one of healthcare’s oldest and most persistent challenges?
They build an alien hospital.
Set 200 years in the future, My 5 Moments: The Game transports players into an international, intergalactic hospital where they must navigate increasingly complex clinical situations, make decisions under pressure and protect patients from infection — while never losing sight of compassionate care.
But this is not simply another healthcare game.
Behind the aliens and imaginary healthcare world sits a serious global health challenge. Healthcare-associated infections continue to cause avoidable harm worldwide, and even well-established evidence-based practices such as hand hygiene remain difficult to translate reliably into everyday behaviours and practices. Traditional post-graduate education can increase knowledge, but knowing what to do does not guarantee that people will do it amid the distractions, competing priorities and human complexity of real healthcare.
So we – Claire Kilpatrick, Julie Storr, Ermira Tartari, Karen (Kat) Schrier, Benedetta Allegranzi, Hugo Sax and a game development company – tried something different as part of a World Health Organization (WHO) infection prevention and WHO Academy project.
Over more than two years, this international transdisciplinary team combined infection prevention expertise with learning science, behavioural theory, game design, storytelling, software development and lived experience – translating these into gameplay mechanics, alongside established approaches to behaviour change.
The result is a game in which learning is not simply delivered: it is experienced. Players encounter distractions that mimic real-world care, progress through increasingly difficult challenges and receive progressively less instructional support. They are rewarded not only for technical hand hygiene accuracy, but for “Golden Moments” of compassionate care. The futuristic alien setting creates distance from familiar assumptions while providing an imaginative environment designed to resonate with a global audience.
The game has already reached players in more than 115 countries. But the story is not just about hand hygiene and preventing life threatening infections — and it is not simply about serious games. It is about how innovation happens when we change who is invited to create a new product.
We call this the Power of AND – inspired by a thirteenth-century Persian Sufi mystic (and recalled by Jules) who once said, “You think because you understand ‘one’ you must also understand ‘two’, because one and one make two. But you must also understand ‘and’.”
- Science and imagination.
- Evidence and experience.
- Technology and humanity.
- Gaming and global health.
- Technical accuracy and compassion.
It is possible to deconstruct the game – the alien hospital – to reveal how research and clinical insights became gameplay, how real experiences became fictional scenarios, where disciplines collided, what we learned from each other during development, and what became possible precisely because no single person in the room had all the answers. It is also possible to explore the tensions that sit behind interdisciplinary innovation – balancing scientific accuracy with creative freedom, pedagogical ambition with technological feasibility, and the universal with the culturally meaningful.
We have already promoted and explained the game in different ways – including most recently at the Healthcare Infection Society conference in London, UK in 2026 – the photo is Claire and Ermira. But also through a promo video, a previous blog, and various WHO webinars and other conferences.
At a time when extraordinary technological advances are reshaping health, perhaps one of the most important questions is not simply what can technology do? It is – who gets to imagine what it could become? Because technology doesn’t just change healthcare, people do.
Claire recalls an experience that influenced her approach to the game in a forthcoming book chapter about health and the arts. She took inspiration from Nile Rodgers speaking at SXSW in 2017, and as such went on to further instil storytelling into her global health work including development of the game. There is a lovely, understated circularity in bringing a story partly sparked by SXSW’s inspiration back to life nearly a decade later while reflecting on this game development to inform future technologies and innovations.
We believe we can all promote the right conditions for radically different forms of expertise to meet, create and design the future of healthcare. Importantly, the future of health innovation may lie in the AND.