Sheridan Nursing Program Using VR Technology to Simulate Real-world Scenarios
As someone with extensive experience working in health care environments, Rocio Paz knows that life comes at nurses fast.
As someone with extensive experience working in health care environments, Rocio Paz knows that life comes at nurses fast.
“You aren’t just dealing with the patients, you’re dealing with their families, and you never know when something might happen,” says Paz, who has spent nearly two decades as a registration and admissions clerk at various area hospitals and clinics. “You need to know how you’re going to respond in situations like that."
Paz and other students in Sheridan’s Practical Nursing diploma program will soon be better prepared to navigate those types of fluid conditions. The program recently implemented immersive virtual reality (VR) technology into its curriculum, utilizing UbiSim software that runs on Oculus Quest 2 headsets and is designed to develop nursing students’ clinical reasoning, decision-making and communication skills.
Explore more
UbiSim Wins 2024 Cool Tool Award from EdTech Digest
The immersive Virtual Reality platform designed for nursing simulation has won the VR/AR Solution category of the annual EdTech Awards.
How the Nursing Educator Shortage Has Created a Tipping Point for Virtual Reality Simulations
Immersive scenarios in VR allow nursing education programs to enhance and scale the hands-on experiences they provide learners for developing and practicing critical skills.
New virtual training lab for RPCC nursing students
As part of a larger initiative in spatial learning, RPCC expanded its VR Mobile Sim Lab to include a permanent, fixed VR Sim Lab at Reserve. With over 50 pre-built scenarios, instructors and students can get started in the VR platform immediately. And when students are done, the VR healthcare platform allows for instructors to capture data that otherwise is counterproductive, if not impossible, to assess student performance with necessary skills. From how long the student took to make decisions, to rewatching the student’s performance, and even automatically capturing skills gaps based on objectives the instructor prescribes, faculty can focus more on the teaching, learning, and reteaching necessary to help students reach their highest potential as healthcare professionals. However, the power of this VR healthcare platform goes beyond those features. In consultation with faculty, RPCC’s Department of Innovative Teaching & Learning is developing their own healthcare experiences in VR to represent situations healthcare professionals more accurately in south Louisiana will encounter.
