Deteriorating Patient Training Using Nonimmersive Virtual Reality: A Descriptive Qualitative Study.

Recent nurse education pedagogical strategies are starting to embrace the use of virtual patient simulations in higher education settings. This study evaluated student, simulation technician, and lecturer perspectives on student performance after virtual training for care of a deteriorating diabetic patient. Second year nursing students learned using a virtual patient simulation, which was a follow-up of a randomized controlled trial that took place during the academic year 2017-2018. Group and individual interviews were conducted comprising the 21 staff and students involved in the virtual reality simulation in four individual lecture sessions. Five themes emerged from this study: engagement, immersion, confidence, knowledge, and challenges. Student participants found that the virtual reality exercise aided their understanding of the complex concepts associated with hypoglycemia, provided immediate feedback about their clinical decisions, could be completed multiple times, and provided more opportunities for safe practice, complimenting their ward and clinical skills experiences. Simulation technicians and lecturing staff also recognized these benefits but identified challenges, including time and cost constraints. We recommend further research into potential benefits and challenges, including likely consequences of increased use of virtual reality technologies for nurse education curriculum design.

Virtual health education: Scaling practice to transform student learning: Using virtual reality learning environments in healthcare education to bridge the theory/practice gap and improve patient safety.

The advancements in and affordability of technologies offer increasing opportunities to modernise healthcare education into packages developed to meet the expectations and requirements of the digital generation. Purposefully designed and tested Virtual Reality Learning Environments (VRLE) can offer healthcare students the means to access and revisit learning materials in ways that enhance education and meet a range of needs; including those with specific learning differences and those who have traditionally been disenfranchised. Furthermore, this will make healthcare education much more readily available to those who have been previously marginalised by distance. This paper argues that Virtual Reality (VR) has the unique potential to transform healthcare education and suggests that more providers should consider collaborating with developers and investing in the technology.