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13 November 2024
3D Virtual Worlds a Promising Tool for Inter-professional Education
Heathcare students’ avatars communicate with one another and an elderly patient at a multi-disciplinary bedside round in a virtual hospital ward.
Researchers from the NUS Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies (NUS Nursing) have developed a novel way to train healthcare students inter-professionally.
Using a research grant from the Singapore Millennium Foundation, Associate Professor Liaw Sok Ying and her team of educators, clinical experts and computer technologists created virtual worlds where healthcare students can interact with one another and their patients using life-like, animated avatars.
From October to December last year, she pilot-tested the virtual simulation program – dubbed CREATIVE – on six teams of final-year healthcare students from three tertiary institutions. They included medical, nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, pharmacy and social work students from NUS, Singapore Institute of Technology and Nanyang Polytechnic.
Learning to work as a team, virtually
In a virtual hospital, teams of six students from the different healthcare courses were given the opportunity to engage in multi-disciplinary bedside rounds and discharge care planning, which allowed them to communicate amongst themselves, and with the patient and his family.
Applying an experiential learning approach, the team role-played the scenarios related to multi-disciplinary team care. This was followed by a team debrief to allow students to reflect on their learning experiences. The learning, which featured standardised patients, was guided by facilitators.
Healthcare students in pilot tests for the CREATIVE (Create Real-life Experience And Teamwork In Virtual Environment) program.
The researchers conducted a preliminary evaluation using quantitative pre and post-test comparisons and qualitative focus group discussions to assess the students’ learning experience.
The healthcare students who participated in the pilot tests reported an improvement in their attitudes towards IPE. These students perceived the use of the virtual platform in supporting social interaction and collaborative learning among the different healthcare professions positively, and could see the feasibility of taking on this mode of learning from their homes.
A/Prof Liaw said, “Our initial findings show that virtual environments as a learning tool has great promise for improving healthcare students’ perception of IPE and better prepares them in interacting and communicating with one another and promoting multi-disciplinary teamwork.
“Preliminary results also indicate that students are ready to engage in IPE through the use of multi-user virtual environments. This holds tremendous potential for using the platform to deliver more collaborative healthcare learning activities across training institutes.”
Significance of study
As Singapore’s population ages, healthcare providers are seeing more patients with multiple chronic conditions, leading to the increasing importance of co-ordinated, team-based care to deliver optimal patient outcomes. Effective multi-disciplinary teamwork is essential to provide high quality patient care.
This requires healthcare workers to communicate with and understand one another’s roles and responsibilities. For healthcare professionals with different backgrounds to be grounded in team-based care delivery, they must first be provided with opportunities to learn with one another, said A/Prof Liaw.
For healthcare professionals with different backgrounds to be grounded in team-based care delivery, they must first be provided with opportunities to learn with one another.
While educators have acknowledged that IPE is essential to the development of a collaborative, practice-ready health workforce, there has been a dearth of IPE activities across tertiary institutions to broaden learning opportunities among diverse healthcare student teams. This is due to geographical locations and scheduling.
“3D virtual environments are thus a viable, innovative tool that can transcend space and time, by bringing together learners from different local – or even international – health education campuses,” A/Prof Liaw said.
The research team is using the data to fine-tune and improve the learning platform for the final phase of the study. This will take the form of a randomised controlled trial, which will assess the effectiveness of the learning platform by evaluating multi-disciplinary teamwork performance on more than 200 students using outcome measures.
