Put in your headsets: Virtual reality can change into a part of a nurse’s training tools

Virtual reality has transformed into an interactive educational tool for pilots and a superb source of entertainment for arcade enthusiasts and residential gamers. However, considered one of its most commendable uses began several a long time ago – as a tool for training health care professionals.

Healthcare applications

Experts who specialise in creating learning experiences for healthcare employees say virtual reality simulations can complement this learning digital ways of learning equivalent to e-learning, virtual instructor-led education and simulation-based learning, and their applications will only increase.

“There are no limits to what we can do with VR today. “Natural evolution is moving into the virtual reality space,” said Lora Sparkman, MHA, BSN, RN, clinical solutions, patient safety and quality partner at Relias, throughout the NurseDot podcast on virtual reality training.

Medical teams have been using VR for a very long time 90’s to develop pre-operative plans and perform complex surgeries. The immersive VR world can recreate real-life surgical scenarios, where surgical teams also learn from mistakes, anticipate complications, and practice corrective actions before attending to the operating theater with an actual patient.

Over the previous few a long time, VR has also been used for:

• Help patients affected by post-traumatic stress disorder
• Treat patients with severe pain as a result of burns
• Enhance physiotherapy treatment
• To correct memory and cognitive functions Functions
• Treat patients with phobias

The use of simulation in nurse training dates back to the Nineteen Sixties, when Resuscy Aniamedical simulator, was used to show cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and HarveyCardiopulmonary patient simulator was created to recreate heart working conditions and teach heart function assessment skills.

Then he got here SimMan originally of the twenty first century, which allowed for a practical picture of the patient’s symptoms. The immersive, interactive approach to learning in virtual reality raises the bar even higher.

For nursing students, virtual reality provides hands-on experience with virtual patients in a clinical setting and teaches the best way to perform tasks equivalent to taking patient histories, starting IV drips, or checking patients’ blood pressure. HealthTech reported that 65% of nursing programs now use VR.

“Over the last few years, nursing schools have really embraced virtual reality and incorporated it into simulation training for nurses,” said Sparkman, who spent 10 years on the bedside and has 27 years of experience in health care administration and consulting, specializing in improving outcomes. patients and reduce risk. “In the virtual space, you can practice using various techniques and using medical equipment and devices.”

Sparkman admits that despite the plain advantages that VR offers, it’s a complement to hands-on learning, not a alternative. Student nurses still need instructors to guide them in clinicals, because recent nurses will need teachers to do the identical, she added. “These nurses are better prepared for real-life care because they have practiced in a safe VR environment and know what to expect.”

Sparkman said experiential learning in virtual reality helps nurses learn at a much faster pace than other types of learning. “It also helps us retain information at a much faster rate,” she added.

Benefits for nurses and nursing students

As a training and continuing education tool for nurses and nursing students, VR:

1. – An immersive environment gives students a more realistic sense of “being there” that translates into real-life practice.
2. – Some VR simulations allow nurses to experience what a patient might see and listen to when being cared for by a nurse or other doctor.
3. – Students practice clinical decision making, critical pondering and problem solving without endangering patients.
4. — Greater retention is due partially to high engagement or the “fun factor” that students enjoy. Studies found that “students show significantly greater learning gains” with virtual reality in comparison with on-screen learning.

Soft skills component

Sparkman said virtual reality is usually a useful tool for developing nurses’ soft skills, equivalent to communication, lively listening, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution and important pondering. It may help train nurses to check with patients and their families, especially in critical situations.

“It’s one of the hardest things if you’ve never been exposed to death and dying or really critically ill patients,” she said. Helping nurses prepare for emotional and difficult conversations and with the ability to provide them with feedback is invaluable, Sparkman said.

Nurses may practice how they need to reply to a patient’s changing symptoms or agitation.

One testwhich focused on the effectiveness of VR in soft skills training, found that VR learners:

• They were as much as 275% more confident in acting on what they learned after the training
• They were as much as 4 times more focused than e-learners
• They were 3.75 times more emotionally connected to the content than in-school students and a couple of.3 times more connected than e-learners

Do hospitals use VR?

Although the speed at which hospitals are incorporating VR into their training methods lags behind nursing schools, Sparkman believes it can soon change into a serious component of constant education and training for interdisciplinary hospital teams.

As with nursing schools, a part of its appeal as a training tool within the hospital setting lies within the engagement factor. “With VR, you can’t be a passive learner,” she said.

Sparkman sees potential for its use in almost any setting. For example, when VR is used to coach obstetric staff, VR training can teach them the best way to take care of emergencies equivalent to hemorrhage, hypertensive crisis, sepsis, or shoulder dystocia.

The appeal of this solution, Sparkman said, can also be related to the way in which hospitals can essentially program VR simulations to include standards of care to keep up physicians’ competency in safely providing high-quality care.

“Imagine that across the enterprise, everyone was immersed in the standards of evidence-based guidelines,” she said. “Research and understanding VR is something we intend to delve into with our solution, Relias OBi.e. personalized assessment-based learning with an immersive VR experience.”

Part of hospitals’ interest in VR simulation technology for training purposes is to indicate the advantages for employees, but in addition for the hospital or the whole healthcare system.

1. — Virtual learning can provide experiences that mimic real-world scenarios and happen anywhere with any number of scholars.
2. — All students have the identical experience, and students may repeat lessons to master the fabric.
3. — Virtual reality can provide realistic images of a wide range of patients and scenarios, so when clinicians encounter them in real life, they will likely be more prone to provide high-quality care to every patient in a consistent and objective manner.

Despite these advantages, hospitals could also be hesitant so as to add VR to their educational tools as a result of the upfront costs. While the initial costs of implementing VR technology could also be higher than more traditional methods equivalent to classroom teaching and e-learning, how these costs change over time could also be an element that hospitals should consider.

According to 1 questionnaire which compared VR training to live exercises, was initially costlier than live exercises. However, in keeping with the study, “the larger initial investment in VR can be spread over a large number of trainees and over a longer period of time with little additional cost,” making it cheaper in the long term.

While hospitals could also be hesitant to adopt VR training, there isn’t any denying that it offers help to healthcare professionals to enhance their skills in a fun, secure and realistic environment.