Accepted for/Published in: Asian/Pacific Island Nursing Journal
Date Submitted: Mar 24, 2025
Date Accepted: Jun 25, 2025
The effect of using virtual reality on school-age children’s and caregivers’ anxiety in the emergency room: A true experimental study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Being treated in an emergency room could be a stressful experience and trigger anxiety in children. Virtual reality (VR) is a technology-based distraction technique that can be used for school-age children.
Objective:
This study aimed to identify the effect of using VR in reducing anxiety in school-age children in an emergency room.
Methods:
This study was a true experimental study using a post-test-only control group design involving 66 children aged 6–12 years who had passed the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The samples were selected using simple random sampling and divided into 33 children in the intervention group and 33 children in the control group. The intervention group received VR intervention and the control group received standard care.
Results:
Most of the respondents were boys (61.9%), accompanied by their mother (54%) and had been admitted to the emergency room in the hospital previously (49.2%). The findings show a significant difference in children’s anxiety between the intervention and control groups [t(61)= -5.907, p <.001]. The mean of the caregivers’ anxiety in the intervention and control groups were 46.06 and 54.44. There was a moderate relationship between caregivers’ and school-age children’s anxiety [r = .532, p<.001].
Conclusions:
This study has proven that VR can reduce school-age children’s anxiety.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.