Family Nurse Practitioner

Immersive Learning in Healthcare

My name is Amber Santos and I am the Director of Innovation and Quality. And what that just means, is that part of my job is to bring [in] innovative active learning into our curriculum. It’s important for a nursing school to continually evolve. We can’t just do the status-quo type of learning and education that we’ve always done. We need to evolve as a school, and part of that is bringing in the technology needed for today’s students in today’s healthcare. 

We’re seeing VR explode in the training industry for a lot of different reasons. We started looking at software that’s out there for the nursing program. There’s actually a surprising number of products that tailor to this type of experience, training nurses and other medical professions. Share Care U has excellent graphics that lets you go inside the human body and see different parts of anatomy and physiology, and then a few others [that] provide simulation experiences where you’re actually in the hospital next to a patient conducting procedures. 

Virtual Reality is an immersive learning tool that we use, and once they put on those goggles they’re literally immersed into that environment. So, we can talk in the classroom about plaque buildup in our arteries and atrial sclerosis, but when they get into that VR world, this immersive world, they get to actually see it and they get to interact with it. [So] they can see how the blood flows through a vessel and how over time, plaque builds up. And then they can also click a box and see how a stent is placed into the vessel. So, it really just immerses them, and it provides a deeper level of learning and understanding. 

My name is Melissa McCray and I am the Student Success Specialist and an assistant professor with the Keigwin School of Nursing. What helps nursing students be successful in nursing school is the use of technology; that’s really a key component. What we are seeing more and more, is very tech-savvy nursing students and that’s great because when you’re in the field of nursing, technology is being introduced every day. And so it’s important that those students are educated in our nursing programs to use some of this technology and interact with that technology. Like I can spin the lungs. Sorry, I’, geeking out a little, there are a lot of secondary benefits from the type of learning we’re providing to our students. It can be just them being a little bit more familiar with the technology, so when they see it in the healthcare setting, and they see a telepresence robot rolling down the hall of the facility they’re working in, they will already have seen that and they will understand how to interact with that and communicate. They will also understand that even though that’s a telepresence robot that could be a family member on the other end, so they still have to have that caring spirit of a nurse. And part of that is worked into our simulations so that they understand that while technology is a wonderful thing, it can never replace the impact a nurse can have. The caring part of what we do.