I was joined by Jack Pottle, co-founder of Oxford Medical Simulation, a VR simulation company to discussed augmented (aR) and virtual reality (VR) in healthcare simulation. Jack started his career as a psychologist, and has now been a doctor in acute medicine for the last 7 years. He got involved in medical education through a FOAMed site he set up called Oxford Medical Education and over the last five years has been involved with simulation – first as a physical sim instructor, now in his role as co-founder and medical director of Oxford Medical simulation.
Jack took us on a deep dive – explaining exactly what is meant by the terms AR and VR, and helped us distinguish the hype around this technology from the true potential to improve training.
We geeked out a little on how it works, but then talked about AR/VR is in healthcare simulation in 2018, ad where it’s going – and its certainly likely to be in a sim program near you very soon, if not already. Anatomy and procedural skills and obvious early applications, but communication skills and teamwork via multiplayer ‘games’ are on the horizon.
Jack will be leading a panel on this topic at SEAM in Spain next week, and we look forward to more from him, and in this interesting field.
VB.
Another great podcast – thanks Vic.
I am still a little sceptical about VR Sim if I’m honest (although possibly a little less sceptical after this). Since a lot of the emphasis in traditional simulation is placed on the debrief I am concerned that this is lost could be lost in VR and relegated down to a tick box (although a very well algorithm one I’m sure) without exploring why something did or didn’t happen. From experience I think a lot of the learning in traditional sim is around human factors which is another thing which I don’t think is quite there yet with VR Sim.
What I can see the benefits for is for storifying learning – instead of teaching in sepsis is diagnosed by A, B & C and you treat it with X, Y and Z (if only it were that easy!) then the learner could experience making the diagnosis and planning the treatment and learning through their mistakes. Is using VR to do this better than the same program on a computer? I’m yet to be convinced (I have looked through the references on Oxford Medical Simulations website – I would suggest any listener to the podcast does the same themselves).
Having started by saying I am sceptical about VR I will be more than happy to be proven wrong.