Interactive tools for teaching public health, outbreak preparedness and response. Each one puts the learner in front of a decision, and then shows them what it cost.
Working under uncertainty, weighing containment against livelihoods and trust, judging when the evidence is strong enough to act: these are the hardest parts of outbreak response, and they are rarely learned well from being told about them. They are learned by deciding under pressure and then living with the result, even when the result is simulated.
If you teach or design training in this field, everything here is free to use in non-commercial teaching, and most of it can be adapted to a different context, audience or pathogen.
The tools here are proof of concept as much as finished products. Each one started from a specific teaching problem: a concept that wasn't landing, a case study that deserved more than a lecture slide, a skill that could only be built through practice.
They have been used in postgraduate classrooms and professional training settings, and adapted for different regional contexts and audience levels. The list of problems that would suit the same treatment is a good deal longer than what is here so far.
Outbreak Crisis Manager is a decision simulation of the public health response to a novel respiratory virus in one of five fictional regions.
Outbreak Crisis Manager has a single-player edition and a facilitated multiplayer version; the author can be contacted for details or access.
Contact the authorThe simulation runs for six rounds, which follow the outbreak from the first unexplained cases to the end of the emergency. In each round the player selects non-pharmaceutical interventions within a budget, and each intervention has effects on five measures: health, economy, public trust, resources and equity. The five regions differ in population, economy, vulnerabilities and political constraints, and the same intervention therefore has different effects in different regions. Three stakeholder groups make requests with deadlines, and misinformation events occur in some rounds.
The interventions that reduce transmission most also carry the largest economic and social costs, and a response that is sound on the evidence can lose the region's political support.
Regional and pathogen parameters can be adapted to other outbreak scenarios. The engine has been re-themed once, into The Forest Edge.
The Forest Edge is a One Health field investigation simulation in which four sectors, Public Health, Animal Health, Food Safety and Environment, respond to a zoonotic outbreak over six rounds.
The Forest Edge has a single-player edition and a facilitated multiplayer version; the author can be contacted for details or access.
Contact the authorEach sector holds only part of the information, field teams, budget and authority needed to control the outbreak, and confirming the source requires evidence that no single sector can obtain alone: the virus in human samples, the virus in the animal source, and an analytic study. In each round a sector reviews the situation and its own signals, resolves a crisis that presents two options, allocates field teams and budget to investigations and control measures, and commits. The round then resolves, and the report shows what changed and what the other three sectors did.
In the single-player edition the player holds one sector and the other three are run by the computer. Their leads report what they see and what they intend, and their findings appear on a shared board once they have investigated. Each round one of them makes a request with a deadline, and a request that is met leads to coordination in the following round. In the facilitated version, run as the scenario Spillover at the Forest Edge, four teams hold the sectors and the facilitator resolves each round on a board visible to the whole room.
IPC in Outbreak Response is a self-paced, scenario-based ward simulation for infection prevention and control nurses and postgraduate students.
The public link is a preview in which scenes 1 to 3 are open; scenes 4 to 8 are available to enrolled students of the MSc programme.
The player takes the role of the IPC lead nurse on a hospital ward and follows an outbreak through eight scenes, from the first ward signal, through preparedness, the response pillars, genomics and global coordination, to recovery. Each decision connects events on the ward to the national and global systems that act on them and return guidance to the bedside. The simulation was developed for the MSc in Infection Prevention and Control at the Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies, National University of Singapore.
The Formula Interactive Exercises are seven self-paced decision exercises built on case studies from The Formula for Better Health by Dr Tom Frieden.
Each exercise places the learner in the position of a decision-maker in a documented case from the history of public health and requires a decision to be committed before the reasoning is revealed. The case studies and the teaching content are Dr Frieden's; the contribution here is the exercise architecture, which turns each case into a sequence of decisions. Each exercise runs in an undergraduate and a graduate mode on the same material and takes about 15 minutes, on its own or within a course.
Before the Curve is a single-player narrative simulation of the public health response to a drug-resistant respiratory outbreak in a fictional city, with the player as its Director of Public Health. The three acts follow the See, Believe and Create framework of The Formula for Better Health.
The city, Meridian, has 600,000 inhabitants, and the player is appointed as the first cases appear in a single working-class district. In the first act, See, the player decides which weak signals to investigate and when the evidence is sufficient to act; in the second, Believe, how to build public and political confidence that the outbreak can be stopped; in the third, Create, how to design a response that is fast and fair, with each part of it assigned to a named person. Each decision is made by playing one card from a hand of options, after which the epidemic curve and the player's standing with the main characters are updated on screen. Decisions cannot be reversed, and their consequences carry through to the end.
The same approach applies wherever a learner needs judgement rather than recall. Some problems in public health training and education that would suit it:
Walking health workers through accreditation standards as an interactive decision sequence, rather than a static checklist or manual.
Orienting new staff to outbreak protocols and institutional systems through scenario-based exercises that build judgment, not just familiarity.
Designing messages for different audiences, outbreak stages, and trust contexts, with feedback that surfaces the consequences of each choice.
Cross-sectoral teams navigating a zoonotic spillover event, with mechanics that make the human-animal-environment interface operationally real.
Building a sentinel network under resource and time constraints, with competing priorities that force genuine tradeoffs.
Translating outbreak modelling outputs and epidemiological evidence into decision-relevant formats for non-technical audiences.
Making epidemic dynamics tangible for younger or non-specialist audiences through simplified but structurally honest simulations.
If you have a teaching problem in outbreak preparedness that belongs here, or one that doesn't, get in touch.
Start a conversation
Dr. Louisa Sun (MB BS, MMed (Int Med), MRCP(UK), MPH) is an infectious diseases and public health physician based in Singapore. She is Head and Consultant of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Alexandra Hospital, National University Health System, and a Visiting Consultant at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases.
Her clinical work spans infectious disease medicine, infection prevention and control, and antimicrobial stewardship. She has led outbreak response operations at the institutional level — including large-scale field response during the COVID-19 pandemic — and contributes to national public health policy across communicable disease governance and antimicrobial resistance. Globally, she is engaged in outbreak preparedness and response through the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN).
In education, she has contributed to the development and delivery of postgraduate programmes in infectious disease emergencies and infection prevention and control, and holds teaching appointments at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore.
Alongside this work, she develops interactive teaching tools for outbreak preparedness education — and is always looking for new problems worth solving.
If any of that resonates, please get in touch.
Every tool here began with someone bringing a teaching problem: a subject matter expert, an educator, or an institution that could already see what wasn't working. If you have one, get in touch.
Commissions, partnerships, and adaptations for non-commercial use are all possible.
