Practicing Interprofessional Team Communication and Collaboration in a Smart Virtual University Hospital

Abstract

A smart university must utilize different technical solutions to offer its students varied and innovative learning environments optimizing the core learning activities. Contact with patients is at the core of medical and health care education and often takes place at a university hospital. However, students from one profession seldom get the chance to practice in hospital setting with students from other professions, and they seldom see the whole patient trajectory during clinical practice. Establishing a smart virtual university hospital mirroring a real life hospital can prepare students for direct patient contact, for example, practice placement and clinical rotation, and thus optimize and sometimes also increase their time on task. Such a virtual arena will support student learning by providing adaptive and flexible solutions for practicing a variety of clinical situations at the students' own pace. We present a framework for a smart virtual university hospital and our experiences on developing and testing solutions for training interprofessional team communication and collaboration. In the main part of the work reported here, medicine and nursing students worked in groups with the clinical scenarios in a virtual hospital using desktop PCs alone and with virtual reality goggles. In the evaluation, it was found that all the students agreed that they had learned about the value of clear communication, which was the main learning outcome. Using virtual reality goggles, almost all the students reported that they felt more engaged into the situation than using desktop PCs alone. At the same time, most also reported 'cyber sickness'. We conclude that a smart virtual university hospital is a feasible alternative for collaborative interprofessional learning.

Procedural Medical Training in VR in a Smart Virtual University Hospital

“…The models for the environment like hospital hallway, rooms and operating rooms were based on the original design of the VirSam project [1]. They were modelled by taking photographs of the operating room at the Neurological center at St.Olavs, in order to create a familiar environment for neurosurgeons.…”

“…Unity3D was chosen as the platform for the development of the solutions, to be used with both HTC Vive or Oculus Rift. Moving on from VirSam [1], it was important to improve the interaction with the virtual world. In the original gynecological VirSam scenario, when performing ultrasound, the physician could only look at a frozen screen and vocally declare the findings.…”

“…A smart virtual university hospital mirroring a real life one can prepare students for direct patient contact and provide opportunities for improving clinical practice. We have worked with the long-term idea of establishing an online Virtual University Hospital (VUH) to create a holistic system and a venue for learning, research, and development [1]. The idea is to make a virtual mirror of the St. Olav's University Hospital (St. Olav), which is integrated with the Faculty of Medicine and Health Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.…”

“…St. Olav is a modern university hospital with a state of the art technological platforms and modern clinical buildings. The first prototype of the Virtual University Hospital has been used for interprofessional communication and collaboration training [1]. Many studies have reported on the potential of 3D virtual worlds for educational activities, especially in medicine and health care [2,3].…”

“…Detailed description of the scenarios can be found in the master thesis that this article is based on [16]. The work is part of the Smart University Hospital framework earlier described by the authors [1].…”