The technology used for virtual reality is advancing quickly. You can see developers creating 3D hospitals for healthcare training purposes. In this article, we will take a look at the ways of better educating the general public and healthcare professionals. Although many people are turning to digital healthcare due to the advent of the pandemic, virtual reality is more a part of the broader health ecosystem. One of the significant benefits of using VR is its capability to educate professionals. You can create a virtual world that will mimic a real-world setting by using virtual reality.
Challenges in training
According to the WHO, we are going to need in excess of 40 million nurses, healthcare workers, new doctors, and other healthcare professionals by the year 2030. This means doubling the current medical professionals. The biggest challenge facing the world is training the required number of people efficiently. The availability of skilled staff will emerge as one of the top risks we will face. The possibility of using VR for supplementing the training models will offer advantages that can address the problems involved in growing and maintaining enough workforce. There are several studies around the world that took a close look at the possibility of using VR for training purposes. You may use VR for improving the performance of the healthcare staff in the real world.
Reality
In one of the broader studies, there was a review of many research articles conducted on VR and its use in the healthcare sector. It revealed that people trained through VR showed greater accuracy in their medical practices. Several other reports indicate the positive effects of using virtual reality. This positive feedback from all across the globe has led to the development of a virtual hospital at Cardiff University. This project has plans for creating a virtual clinical placement for healthcare practitioners where they will be able to apply their textbook knowledge to real-life scenarios. Virtual reality allows the trainers to measure the performance of students better and provide an immersive training experience by using a 3D learning environment. Organizations involved in the project believe that healthcare professional education, in the long run, will be improved by using virtual reality.
Using virtual reality for real-world education
Although there is obvious potential here for the training of medical personnel securely and safely, you can also consider VR for educating the general public. You may use it for providing additional info about a treatment. Or you may make a greater effort and educate people about some specific issues. Health literacy has become a talking point due to the advent of the pandemic. If the health literacy of a person is poor, he or she is more susceptible to misinformation. Vaccination hesitancy could be observed during the pandemic in many people. Some people turned to virtual reality to educate communities about immunity. The VR training was found to be more effective than the usual text and image treatment. A combination of both treatments improved the vaccination intention further.
There is one major advantage of using virtual reality. It provides the capability to create a learning tool where carrying out the same thing in the real world will be expensive and extremely challenging. Because of the creative way of using the tool, the VR potential in healthcare is limited only to the imagination of the applicants. With the VR tools extending their use in medical treatments, the familiarity with the use of the technology is gradually growing. The next step in this regard will be how to scale the use of this technology. In case you love VR gaming and you live in Tampa Bay, FL area, go to XGS VRCADE to get a glimpse of the real thing.
