Yale Center for Healthcare Simulation (YCHS) recently purchased a Virtual Reality (VR) platform. “We have selected VR innovative technology because it offers both nursing educational simulation scenarios and interprofessional simulations for physicians, nurses, technicians and medical/PA students” according to Leigh Evans, MD, executive director of YCHS. It is beneficial to use VR to close any gaps identified within traditional simulation to train clinical teams of RN’s, MD’s, medical students, residents and hospitalist staff. “Our hope is to use VR to do more than just orient a nurse. VR allows the interprofessional team to train and grow together in a convenient space,” stated Cheryl Thomas, RN and Yale’s nursing professional development specialist on the VR training platform.
VR Modalities of Simulation Training
VR caters to a variety of learners and offers a broad spectrum of engaged training, at different levels. What sets VR apart is that it promotes interprofessional training. It meets the needs and does not require everyone to be in the same room, because removing clinicians from the bedside for training can be difficult. VR solves the issue of training clinicians working throughout the state and in the health system. It helps to promote and to achieve signature care by training clinicians similarly.
VR provides an opportunity for realistic interprofessional training. Traditional simulation training does not represent all of the modern “patient unfolding cases” and it is difficult to engage specialty clinicians. This platform may be used outside of the YCHS traditional space, and it allows for a broader outreach of clinicians to engage in hands-on, simultaneous virtual training with others.
Instructors leverage VR technology with customized scenarios to train staff. Students wear VR headsets to interact with a “virtual patient” in an environment where they can ask questions, make informed decisions and perform procedures in a controlled and safe space.
VR provides additional resources/simulation tools to assist in training clinicians to meet specific Joint Commission standards, for example, in Labor & Birth. The hope is that it can be used to collect metrics in the safety and quality environment and to use VR to provide team training to improve safety outcomes.
VR is intended to serve as an engaging resource to assist with new graduate (newly licensed) nurse training. It helps to identify gaps and to improve upon things like “failure to rescue” due to the lack of early identification of change in conditions, medication needs, and it will help improve team communication overall. It will help to identify cases with unique complications by utilizing specific scenarios that include situations of chest tube complications, diabetes and tracheostomy issues, and neurologic changes, just to name a few.
“Another exciting part of this, is that it provides the opportunity for outreach to include high school students, engaging them in healthcare sooner,” stated Samreen Vora, MD, assistant professor of emergency medicine and advisor to the high school students. VR helps to promote hands on training in STEM programs and aligns with the mission for Simulation Academy at Yale at YCHS.