Acuity levels often refer to a patient’s status level, with higher acuity meaning a more unstable condition. Sepsis is one example of a condition with high acuity.
A high acuity setting may refer to the intensive care unit (ICU) or emergency department (ED).
Nursing in high acuity environments requires honed critical thinking and clinical reasoning skills with precise clinical judgment, often all happening in a highly time-sensitive situation.
This often precarious environment calls for exceedingly prepared nurses, but training for these situations can be quite difficult. This is, in part, what makes virtual reality a great candidate for this type of training.
VR training for high acuity nursing
Virtual reality immerses learners in the virtual environment, increasing the sense of presence and heightening the realism of the scenario.
Learners conduct the scenario autonomously and must make timely clinical decisions based on the observations and data they collect (or delegate to a nursing assistant).
This type of training method enables endless repeatability of VR scenarios, providing an avenue for repeated practice and feedback for complex clinical situations – an opportunity difficult or, at times, impossible to recreate by traditional simulation methods.
Benefits of VR training for high acuity situations
There are many benefits to using VR simulations for education and training – it’s cost effective and can save educators valuable time, but there are also benefits specific to high acuity nursing:
1. Psychologically safe environment
With high acuity situations, conditions, or environments, nurses are working with a population that’s inherently more at risk than in other environments.
Nurses need to feel prepared and confident in the clinical competencies before ever working a high acuity situation – these environments make it very difficult to practice skills for a more novice learner.
In virtual reality, learners and patients are all safe – learners can practice and make mistakes in the safety of the virtual environment before ever working in a high acuity setting.
VR scenarios proactively mitigate risk by providing a safe space for learners to hone their skills with high acuity situations. Learners get immediate feedback and can debrief with a clinical supervisor or faculty member to better understand their clinical performance.
They can then repeat that scenario or work in another high acuity VR scenario to continue to bolster their skills, and their confidence, ahead of facing a true emergency.
2. Flexibility
For learners and educators, virtual reality provides a flexibility that traditional methods like manikin-based simulation simply cannot, and that’s part of what makes it a meaningful addition to a robust simulation program.
OMS scenarios, for example, do not require a facilitator to run them – they can be conducted anywhere. Whether in the clinical offices or at home, learners can access scenarios and work through cases in real time from anywhere.
This level of access to simulation is unprecedented. Some institutions are running upwards of 20,000 simulations per semester this way. That’s an unparalleled amount of simulation and of opportunity for learners to practice their skills in an application-based manner.
3. Realism
Some conditions or situations are nearly impossible to replicate by other means, like pediatric emergencies, for example.
One key feature of OMS scenarios is the underlying physiology engine that powers real time changes in patient conditions based on actions the learner takes or misses.
Learners can observe a patient’s condition deteriorating, which can increase the pressure and urgency of the simulation. Learners must maintain a calm demeanor while rapidly addressing a worsening situation, and they must quickly determine whether to escalate care.
This helps learners to increase the muscle memory of escalating care without getting sidetracked by the stress of the situation.
For one nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital, VR helped her feel “much more prepared for an emergency she was in in real life, and she attributed that to her experience with OMS”.
4. Specific case-related feedback
Following a day of simulation, learners need direct feedback to more deeply understand their clinical performance. After all, much of the learning takes place during the debriefing process, and feedback is a large part of that.
In VR, learners’ actions are tracked and timestamped, improving the standardization and personalization of the feedback.
Following a VR scenario, learners receive feedback immediately. They can see exactly what went well or where they need to improve.
They may see feedback that details an action they took that was correct but could have been done earlier to prevent a worsening of the patient’s condition.
The importance of actions is categorized, and learners can delve deeper into feedback points with rationale and evidence for further reading.
With immediate feedback, learners can see exactly how their clinical performance related to the patient’s condition, and how that impacted the scenario overall.
Virtual reality provides learners with more simulation, more often, and when it comes to high acuity situations, every chance to have a meaningful learning opportunity counts.