Public Health Minister: The Simulation.
A teaching simulator for applied epidemiology, ageing policy, prevention, frailty, budget pressure and the uncomfortable trade-offs of public health leadership.
Try the simulator
Step into the Cabinet Office. Balance the budget, manage the Frailty Index and try to close the Healthy Life Expectancy gap over a 12-year mandate.
Learning about public health and ageing from a textbook is valuable for theory. But it rarely trains students to solve a real-world, rapidly shifting health crisis.
The teaching challenge
When we teach the dynamics of an ageing population, we often present problems in a vacuum. A student learns about frailty or reads a paper on healthy life expectancy, then writes a report suggesting a new care policy.
In the real world, especially in government, that policy costs money. It competes with funding for hospitals. It needs political support, and its success can be derailed by unexpected events. Normal classrooms do not have a good way to teach those pressures.
To work on that gap, I built EpiNation: Public Health Minister, The Simulation.
How the game works
The game is a digital version of a national healthcare system. Players get a £100 billion budget and a 12-year term in office. They decide how to spend money across three areas:
- Hospital to community: funding local care hubs and fixing social care.
- Analogue to digital: investing in AI health tools and unified patient records.
- Sickness to prevention: banning junk food adverts and improving poor housing.
Balancing the books
Everything in the game is connected. Spend all the money on prevention and long-term healthy life expectancy may improve, but immediate hospital crises can be ignored. That can cause national frailty rates to spike, drop public approval and create political trouble inside the simulation.
The main goal is not only asking whether health got better. It is a juggling act: balance overall health, the inequality gap between rich and poor, and political survival.
AI-powered interpretation
The simulator's core mechanics are built on evidence-informed demographic ideas, while the interpretation of the player's performance is driven by an LLM architecture.
At the end of each round, the game takes the spending choices, health scores and random events, such as a sudden winter flu or a technology failure, and feeds them into the AI model.
Rather than giving students only a dry score out of 100, it produces a strategy audit with dynamically generated headlines that reflect the public and political consequences of their decisions.
Why gamify public health?
By putting population ageing into a game, students have to deal with the messy reality of tight budgets and hard choices. It pushes them to think about systems rather than memorising facts about demographic shifts.
Tools like EpiNation offer a safe space where a large policy failure damages a student's pride for five minutes rather than costing the taxpayer billions or failing an entire generation of older adults.