Thanks to grant funding provided by the UPMC Jameson Foundation and the Caroline Fredricka Holdship Charitable Trust, UPMC Jameson’s Nursing Education Department has access to cutting edge technology for use in training local nurses. UPMC Jameson and UPMC Horizon are the first hospitals within UPMC to be able to utilize virtual reality devices, which can be used to place local nurses in a variety of scenarios designed to test and improve their patient care skills.
Making use of Meta VR headsets and specialized hospital training software by SimX, the system lets multiple nurses at multiple locations wear the technology to be placed in the same virtual “hospital”. Users see hospital rooms, equipment, patients, family members and other users in a computer-generated scene, and can move around and interact with the virtual medical tools and people present. Education staff can use computers to “see” what their students are seeing, and also change the parameters of the scenario in real time.
Scenario options range from routine to emergency situations. Users can listen to a patient’s heartbeat, administer medication, take phone calls from virtual doctors or pharmacies, or interact with a patient’s family members, who may be worried or upset. With the options available to educators, they can transform a routine examination into an emergency, training staff to react quickly and effectively to situations they might see in a hospital setting.
“The system provides realistic patient care experiences for nurses by placing them in a virtual space that looks and functions similarly to that of a hospital,” says Michele Albaugh, a Nurse Educator at UPMC Jameson who oversees training using the system. “It’s particularly useful since it requires them to practice critical thinking skills by putting them directly into a scenario, rather than just having them read a book or hear a lecture about that scenario.”
VR training programs expand options for training nurses and healthcare professionals beyond traditional lectures, mannequin practice, and lab sessions. The SimX system allows Jameson’s nurse educators to easily transport training between UPMC’s three local hospitals or other locations, enabling staff to join the same virtual “room” from different physical sites. Educators can remotely observe students’ actions by streaming scenes to other computers.
