[Applying Virtual Reality Assisted Critical Thinking Training Programs Among Nurse Practitioners]

The three-dimensional virtual world generated in virtual reality (VR) environments involves vision, hearing, touch, and potentially other user senses. VR environments are designed to closely simulate real situations/scenarios, allowing users to observe and engage in experiences free of time and space restrictions. Virtual patients are an extension of virtual reality. In recent years, virtual reality exercises have been widely used in various medical education and training programs to promote professional competence. The clinical practice of nurse practitioners is similar to physicians in some institutions. Nurse practitioners perform supplementary medical services such as physical assessment, medical history collection and consultation, problem detection, test result assessment, differential diagnosis, and patient health problem decision-making under the supervision of physicians. The critical thinking component in nurse practitioner education is largely similar to that taught in medical education. VR is often used in medical education to train medical students. Also, VR may be applied in critical thinking training for nurse practitioners to promote competence in reasoning and differential diagnosis. However, few studies in the literature have evaluated the effectiveness of VR-based training for nurse practitioners in Taiwan. In the future, this issue needs to be studied further.