Enhancing Interpersonal Skills of Nursing Students with VR at HELIX

Nursing Lecturers Dr. Gary Morris, Jane Cahill, and Digital Education Lecturer Nancy Davies have harnessed the advanced VR capabilities at HELIX to support the interpersonal and empathic learning of second-year undergraduate Mental Health Nursing students. 

Their module, HECS 2333: Health Promotion and Facilitation of Recovery Through Empathic Engagement, uses virtual reality for clinical training, with a focus on perinatal mental health. Through Fracture Reality’s JoinXR simulation, Stacey, developed with Health Education England and the University of Leeds, students practice communication skills by interacting with a virtual patient experiencing postnatal depression. 

Location: HELIX Meeting Rooms

Aims: Provide a safe and immersive environment where students can practise and develop essential communication skills for patient interactions.

Output: Guided by Dr. Cahill, students took turns using the VR headset, engaging with Stacey while peers observed the interactions on a monitor. The session concluded with supervisory feedback. Stacey is the first extended reality scenario created for perinatal mental health, representing an exciting development in clinical training.

Impact: Students gained hands-on experience in empathic patient communication, crucial for effective mental health care, in a controlled and supportive setting.

Why did you choose HELIX for your project?

“Well, you’ve got the headsets,” Davies explains, Dr. Morris agrees and adds that when they were introduced to HELIX they discovered “a lot of exciting technological resources, so it seemed a great place to access the technology and try out what this new facility offered.”  

How did working in HELIX help you achieve your aims?

Davies said:  "Without HELIX’s resources, we couldn’t have run this project. Securing funding just for the software license was challenging enough. If we’d needed additional funding for the technology, it would have made launching this project significantly harder."

Do you have any advice to share from your HELIX experience?

“Work out what you need the space for, book well in advance”, advises Dr. Morris. In addition, “just spend the time to get used to place and to do a test run”, says Davies. “Always do a test run, whatever you’re doing.” 

For more information, read about how a virtual patient teaches mental health skills.