Nursing students at Calgary's Bow Valley College get hands-on training through VR

Nursing students at Bow Valley College in Calgary are getting hands-on experience treating patients in a clinical setting before even stepping into a hospital through a virtual reality (VR) training program.

The School of Health and Wellness at the college brought in new technology over the past year, providing students with diverse care situations they will find in the real world.

"The more scenarios and more experience you have under your belt as a nurse, the better equipped you are to deal with and handle the stress in the hospital setting," said Melissa Bruce, program chair and former NICU nurse.

UbiSim offers different avatars, or virtual patients, ranging in age and ethnicity and dealing with a variety of conditions in a controlled environment.

Similar to some VR consoles used for gaming, students are equipped with a headset and controllers, allowing them to move freely as they would in a hospital room.

They take on different roles in each sim, can speak to colleagues, review patients' files, medications, procedures and take vital readings.

"We are taking our learners through many different situations, so patient care situations, and allowing them to gain that experience, so when we bring it into the clinical setting, they have some experience they are really able to pull off of and bring into that clinical judgment or clinical reasoning," Bruce said.

The VR program has run for several years but has been scaled up over the past year with new technology at Bow Valley College to include more than 700 nurses and 1,500 practical nurses using it.

Around 10,000 hours were logged last month in the program.

Euphemia Ezuma, a practical nursing student in her final term, says the program makes her feel more competent and confident treating patients.

"You feel like you are in the hospital except you are in a controlled environment, but it's real life. You see a patient that is breathing, that's talking to you, that's telling you how they feel, that's communicating with you. I feel like I'm present,” she said.

"I was like, 'Wow, I can't believe that's what it's going to be in a real-life situation.'"

The use of artificial intelligence in the health-care industry is growing quickly and is being leveraged to give students the skills they need to be work-ready and in the field, fast, amid an ongoing staffing shortage in the industry.

"Often times, VR programs also allow extra capacity for more students to get clinical hours taken care of in their program, and we want those clinical hours to feel exactly as they would in any other high-fidelity, high-simulation environment, said Shawn Boom, UbiSim CEO.

Boom says the technology is continually improving to be as realistic as possible and allows the college to script the program to specific situations unique to Alberta.

"There are nuances here in Canada and so the ability to customize the language (and) the measurements we use within the simulation create a diversity of population that mirrors what the local population looks like to get possibly a rural nurse ready to encounter the kind of people they'll be serving every day," he said.

Ezuma says the program made her feel more comfortable going to her hospital practicum placement.

"It gives you the opportunity to learn, to sharpen those skills, to ask questions, to correct your mistakes, to build on what you've learned and to be able to execute them without causing any harm to the patient," she said.