The Power of VR Simulation: A New Frontier in Healthcare Education by Dr. Dan Weberg

Written by Dr. Dan Weberg, PhD, MHI, RN, FAAN, an expert in nursing, healthcare innovation, and human-centered patient design with extensive clinical and academic experience. His roles span being faculty at The Ohio State University College of Nursing, Head of Clinical Innovation for Trusted Health, fellow at the American Academy of Nursing, and more.

Healthcare education is at a pivotal point, and I've been exploring how we can enhance traditional training methods to create more competent and confident professionals. The answer, I believe, lies in a strategic integration of virtual reality (VR) simulation into the education experience. It’s not about replacing time-tested techniques like didactic learning or manikin-based simulation, but rather building a more comprehensive and effective learning framework.

Evidence: Why VR Matters in Healthcare Education

Recent literature from the last three years, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses (especially Sung et al, 2024), provides compelling evidence for the efficacy of VR simulation as a transformative tool in healthcare education. 

The findings consistently indicate that VR significantly improves learning outcomes across a range of key areas: enhancing knowledge, refining procedural skills, and cultivating critical soft skills such as empathy and communication. The core value of VR lies in its ability to offer a scalable, repeatable, and risk-free training environment, which directly addresses profound systemic challenges in the healthcare sector. These challenges include a national nursing and faculty shortage, limited clinical placements, and the prohibitive costs and logistical complexities associated with traditional training methods.

The Future of VR in Healthcare Education

The future of VR in healthcare education is not a standalone technology but an integrated ecosystem, one that is increasingly poised to synergize with advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and the creation of "digital twins" to produce highly personalized, data-rich, and predictive training platforms. This evolution suggests that the strategic integration of VR is a necessary step to enhance both the quality of learning and the overall competence of future healthcare professionals.

Traditional methods of healthcare training, such as cadaver dissection, high-fidelity manikins, and live clinical practice, have long been the cornerstone of medical education. However, he high costs and resource-intensive nature of these approaches, along with the inherent risks to patient safety, have made it difficult to provide a wide variety of standardized, repeatable scenarios for all learners, which has spurred the search for innovative alternatives. 

Modality reassessments are particularly critical in the context of the national nursing shortage, which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects will have over 194,000 annual openings through 2033. The shortage is exacerbated by educational bottlenecks, including a lack of nurse faculty and a scarcity of clinical sites, which limit student intake capacity at many institutions.

VR as a Personalized, Scalable, and Safe Learning Solution

The global digital transformation, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has highlighted the urgent need for flexible, accessible, and scalable educational solutions. This environment has provided fertile ground for the development and integration of technologies like VR, augmented reality (AR), and extended reality (XR) to serve as vital complements or alternatives to traditional training. The emergence of VR simulation is therefore not a matter of technological novelty but a strategic response to a systemic crisis in healthcare education, one driven by economic, logistical, and safety constraints. The transition to VR is a necessary evolutionary step in pedagogical methodology, aiming to address a public health and workforce crisis by providing a more efficient and effective training model.

VR platforms like UbiSim allow for highly customized learning modules that can be tailored to a student’s specific learning objectives and proficiency level. This empowers trainees to learn at their own pace. At the same time, VR ensures a standardized training experience for every learner, which is crucial for equitable skill acquisition across medical teams. A key benefit that traditional methods cannot easily replicate is the ability for deliberate practice. VR scenarios can be repeated indefinitely, allowing trainees to make mistakes safely and then learn through repetition until they achieve mastery and develop the muscle memory critical for high-stakes procedures. This combination of personalization and standardization, coupled with the opportunity for unlimited practice, fundamentally enhances the learning process.

A Tiered Framework for Learning with VR

Stage 1: Didactic Learning - Focus on foundational knowledge and theory.

The foundational element of this innovative framework is didactic learning, which encompasses the crucial theoretical knowledge acquired through traditional methods such as lectures, readings, and textbooks. This initial stage is paramount as it lays the groundwork by establishing the fundamental "why" behind every medical procedure, decision, and patient interaction. It's during this phase that learners develop a deep understanding of anatomical structures, physiological processes, pharmacological principles, and the underlying rationale for clinical interventions.

Stage 2: VR Simulation - Safe, repeatable practice, skill-building, and confidence.

After the initial information has been taught using didactic techniques, VR simulation serves as a transformative second step, offering a dynamic and entirely risk-free environment for unlimited practice. This is where learners can repeatedly engage with complex medical scenarios, hone their psychomotor skills, and refine their decision-making abilities within a virtual space. The benefits of VR in this context are strongly supported by a growing body of research, which consistently highlights VR's remarkable capacity to improve both knowledge retention and skill acquisition. The immersive nature of VR allows for realistic replication of clinical settings, enabling learners to experience diverse patient conditions and procedural challenges without any real-world consequences, thereby fostering confidence and competence.

Stage 3: Manikin Simulation - Hands-on application bridging virtual to real-world skills.

This virtual experience then seamlessly transitions into the physical world through manikin simulation. This crucial stage provides learners with the opportunity to apply their newly acquired skills and knowledge with tangible equipment in a realistic, yet controlled, setting. Manikin simulations offer a bridge between the virtual and real, allowing for hands-on practice with medical devices, patient assessment techniques, and team communication in a high-fidelity environment. This step is vital for developing a nuanced understanding of equipment operation, tactile feedback, and the practicalities of patient care, all while receiving immediate feedback from instructors.

Stage 4: Clinical Rotations - Integration into authentic patient care.

The final and arguably most crucial step in this comprehensive educational cycle is clinical rotations. This stage solidifies all prior learning within the demanding and unpredictable context of real-life patient care. Clinical rotations provide learners with invaluable exposure to diverse patient populations, complex medical conditions, and the intricacies of interdisciplinary healthcare teams. It is here that theoretical knowledge, virtual practice, and manikin-based skills are integrated and applied in authentic clinical settings, allowing learners to develop critical thinking, adaptability, and the professional judgment necessary for independent practice.

Benefits of the Multi-Modal Approach

This tiered and progressive approach—from didactic instruction establishing foundational knowledge, to VR practice offering limitless skill refinement, followed by manikin simulation for hands-on application, and culminating in clinical rotations for real-world integration—creates a powerful and highly effective educational cycle. 

This multi-modal strategy allows the learner to incrementally build their skills over time, utilizing a diverse array of educational tools. By providing a safe space for unlimited practice, VR technology, in particular, empowers learners to cultivate competence and confidence without any associated risk to actual patients. The compelling data supporting this approach is undeniable, with numerous studies consistently demonstrating that VR simulation can significantly enhance procedural skills, improve critical decision-making abilities, and foster a more prepared and confident healthcare workforce.

The integration of VR into healthcare education represents a profound leap forward, offering a powerful and innovative tool to train the next generation of healthcare professionals with unparalleled precision, preparedness, and ethical responsibility. This comprehensive framework not only optimizes learning outcomes but also ensures that future healthcare providers are equipped to deliver high-quality, safe, and effective patient care from day one.

VR Adoption

The explosion of VR in the learning space has brought us back to the realities of adopting new technology and teaching methods into the healthcare education environment.  As educators, we have been through this many times before, most recently with High Fidelity Manikin Simulation.  In 2012 I studied the adoption of manikin simulation in nursing schools as the focus for my PhD work.  Then, clinical placement restrictions were the driving force for manikin simulation adoption.  Educators in the med-surg and critical care areas tended to adopt simulation quickly to run mock code blues and emergency situation simulations.  As other educators saw the impact of simulation on learners, other groups like Maternal Child educators and psychiatric educators began to build new simulations.  Over time, the use of simulation spread across all areas of healthcare education and quickly became a tool to prep learners to move into clinical rotations with more confidence.  

VR simulation is now on the same trajectory, with initial scenarios being simple tasks like assessments or medication administration.  Now, scenarios are blooming into complex situations in realistic environments empowered by digital twin patient information.  We need to learn from our previous adoption of innovations into education to support VR adoption, too.  The same issues that arose with manikin simulation continue to plague the assumptions of educators in the VR space. Cost, quality, and content rule the discussions in the simulation conferences when debating on the use of VR.  While valid concerns, we eventually adopted massive simulation centers with $100,000 manikins and massive space and building requirements. With VR, a $300 headset can service hundreds of students at the cost of about 2 textbooks.

Final Thoughts

The journey toward a more robust and effective healthcare education system is continuous, and the strategic integration of VR simulation marks a pivotal advancement. By building upon the successes and lessons learned from the adoption of high-fidelity manikin simulation, we can navigate the current discussions around cost, quality, and content with confidence. 

VR offers a scalable, cost-effective, and highly impactful solution that can address critical systemic challenges like workforce shortages and limited clinical placements. Ultimately, embracing this technology within a comprehensive framework, from didactic learning to clinical rotations, is not merely about technological adoption; it is about evolving our pedagogical approach to ensure the next generation of healthcare professionals is exceptionally prepared, confident, and competent to meet the demands of patient care.

References

Kim, Y. W., Lee, I., Lee, J., & Kim, C. (2024). A systematic literature review and meta-analysis on the effectiveness of VR-based healthcare education. Sustainability, 16(19), 8520.

Knobovitch, R. M., Tokuno, J., Botelho, F., Fried, H. B., Carver, T. E., & Fried, G. M. (2025). Virtual Reality Training Improves Procedural Skills in Mannequin-Based Simulation in Medical Students: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial. Surgical Innovation.

Mondal, H., & Mondal, S. (2025). Adopting augmented reality and virtual reality in medical education in resource-limited settings: constraints and the way forward. Advances in Physiology Education, 49(2), 503-507.

Pira, G. L., Ruini, C., Vescovelli, F., Baños, R., & Ventura, S. (2025). Could empathy be taught? The role of advanced technologies to foster empathy in medical students and healthcare professionals: A systematic review. Journal of Medical Systems, 49(1), 6.

Sung, H., Kim, M., Park, J., Shin, N., & Han, Y. (2024). Effectiveness of virtual reality in healthcare education: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Sustainability, 16(19), 8520.