JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

A critical component of disaster preparedness in hospital is experiential education and training of healthcare professionals. Live drill is a well-established training approach, but cost restraints and logistic constraints make clinical implementation challenging, and training opportunities with live drills may be severely limited. Virtual reality simulation (VRS) technology may offer a viable alternative with its inherent features of reproducibility, just-in-time training, and repeatability.

Objective:

This integrated review examines the scientific evidence pertaining to the effectiveness of VRS and its usefulness in training healthcare professionals for in-hospital disaster preparedness.

Methods:

A well-known five-stage methodology was used for the review process. The review process consisted of identification of the problem and purposes, a defined literature search strategy and inclusion criteria determination, evaluation and analysis of collected studies, and presentation of findings. A search of diverse publication repositories was performed. They included Web of Science (WOS), PubMed (PMD), and Embase (EMB).

Results:

The review resulted in twelve studies included. Principle findings identified three major themes including: capabilities of VRS (i) to virtually replicate hospital environment and clinical practices; (ii) to improve learning effects; and (iii) enable cost-effective implementation.

Conclusions:

The findings from the review suggested VRS could be a competitive, cost-effective adjunct to existing training approaches. As VR continues to evolve in all technological aspects, it is anticipated that studies using VRS can become more vitalized in clinical domain while addressing currently unsolved issues.