JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Effective inter-professional teamwork is vital for ensuring high-quality patient care, especially in emergency medicine. However, inter-professional education often fails to facilitate meaningful interaction among healthcare disciplines. Therefore, introducing early opportunities for cultivating inter-professional teamwork skills is imperative. While in-person simulation-based training has been shown to improve performance, it is resource-intensive, especially when involving multiple professions. The implementation of Virtual Reality (VR)-based training emerges as an innovative instructional approach that demands fewer resources and offers the flexibility of location-independent learning.

Objective:

Here, we report on the development, content and evaluation of an inter-professional team (INTEAM) training course that includes a VR simulation of a neurological emergency case.

Methods:

The 2h-long INTEAM training course for nursing and medical students includes an e-learning part, a VR simulation and a debriefing. The main learning objectives were derived from the Entrustable Professional Activity (EPA) 6, namely to handle a common emergency medical problem (headache due to subarachnoid hemorrhage, epileptic seizure) that requires inter-professional collaboration including a structured handover. In an evaluation study, we assessed the acceptance, subjective and objective effectiveness, and feasibility of the course with validated and self-constructed questionnaires, pre-post-tests, and open questions.

Results:

The data of 42 students (21 nursing and 21 medical students) were analyzed and showed a good usability in the System Usability Scale (median 72.5, IQR 65-80). The perception of the usefulness (median 6, IQR 5.8-6.9), and ease of use (median 5.9, IQR 5.1-6.3) was high among all students. There was a significant increase of the handover performance from pre- (median 8, IQR 6-9) to post-training (median 8, IQR 7-9; z=-2.01, P=.045, r=.33) and of the confidence in caring for patients with seizures (median 3, IQR 2-3 and median 3.5, IQR 3-4, resp., z=-3.8, P<.001, r=.60). In 67% of the simulations, technical issues occurred, however, all simulations could be carried out completely.

Conclusions:

The new INTEAM training course was well received by nursing and medical students, improving their handover skills and confidence in caring for patients with seizures. Despite technical challenges with the VR simulations, none required termination, demonstrating the feasibility of our approach. These promising results encourage the use of VR simulations for team trainings in the education of nursing and medical students.