I was lucky enough to spend some time chatting with Ben Ellis from Oxford Brookes University, about the possibilities of using VR for clinical education. A decade ago virtual reality was something that only the military and high end research labs could afford. But recently, thanks to initiatives like Google’s Cardboard, Daydream and Jump, pretty good VR experiences can be created and shared for relatively low cost. The purpose of this post is to – very briefly – explore what a VR research project in clinical education might look like.
Establish a clinical / educational problem that is difficult to address in a traditional educational context. There are many examples but the one I always think about is the undergraduate student who is working with a patient who goes into cardiac arrest. That’s a situation we can’t plan for and that no amount of theoretical study will prepare the student for. A less extreme example might be the novice student who goes into the ICU for the first time.
Highlight the learning context. I would take this in the direction that learning in these situations is about exploring the emotional response that students experience when exposed to traumatic or at least, difficult, clinical encounters. Imagine debriefing a student after a variety of controlled exposures to very challenging clinical experiences. For example, what possibilities exist for designing those experiences to introduce students into situations where they may be morally compromised?
Describe how virtual reality can be used to work on the problem. There’s enough literature to show that exposure to situations that look and sound real (i.e. have high fidelity) can lead to a visceral response from students. We could create scenarios that are impossible to plan for in the real world, and then work with students in those controlled contexts to help them learn how to respond later.
Create the VR experiences using relatively low cost gear e.g. Google’s Jump camera rig. The research proposal would budget for buying the cameras needed to create the experiences. We’d collaboratively design the experiences across departments in different countries, so that the experiences students are exposed to could be quite diverse in nature. With 2-3 camera rigs we could probably put together a small library of experiences from several different placements.
Run the project. Expose students from a variety of different departments to those simulated clinical encounters and conduct debriefing sessions afterwards. Record the sessions (obviously we’d have consent, etc. since this would be a registered research protocol) and conduct analysis on the transcriptions. Share the outcomes and responses between the collaborating institutions.
Use the interpreted data to develop a model of engagement in these contexts. Prepare a worksheet – or something like that – to enable others to prepare students in advance, guide the debriefing, etc. Publish the models on an open access repository (e.g. Physiopedia), along with the VR experiences themselves, allowing anyone with a phone to go through the same experiences.
OK, so it’s not complete and there are probably a ton of problems with the idea so far, but I wanted to get it out there as a base to work from. If you’re interested in the potential of VR in clinical education, please get in touch.