Undergraduate Nursing Student Experiences in Using Immersive Virtual Reality to Manage a Patient With a Foreign Object in the Right Lung

Abstract

Abstract Background Within the ever-expanding world of virtual reality for education, numerous strides have been made towards providing students with quality teaching and learning opportunities. One such application area that has not been exhaustively investigated is within nursing education. Methods To help the research community to understand nursing students perceptions towards the use of virtual reality as a possible alternative to high-fidelity simulation and to determine whether students would enjoy virtual clinical simulation, undergraduate nursing students for a South African higher education institution were asked to partake in a virtual clinical simulation where they could manage a patient with a foreign object in the airway. The virtual environment (VE) already existed and was previously tested for the purpose of training third and fourth year undergraduate nurses during previous research endeavours. For the project discussed in this article, the participants consisted of third year undergraduate nursing students, as they had the theoretical knowledge to partake in the simulation. During the testing sessions, observational data were recorded along with subjective opinions captured through questionnaires to determine how the students experienced the VE and the simulation. Results Although the results indicated that future improvements were needed to maintain a relevant and evolving VE and scenario, the students experiences were overwhelmingly positive. Conclusion The created VE and scenario were found to be useable to the extent where the nursing students indicated that they would benefit from this teaching and learning method.