Performance and Perceptions of Health Care Professionals Using an Immersive Virtual Reality Tool for Home Care...

Area of Science:

• Medical Simulation
• Virtual Reality in Healthcare
• Caregiver Training

Background:

• Informal caregivers often lack formal training, posing risks to patient safety in home care.
• Immersive virtual reality (VR) offers a safe, simulated environment for training essential caregiving skills.
• Assessing VR training feasibility and acceptability by healthcare professionals is crucial before widespread implementation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of immersive VR training for home caregiving tasks.
• To develop initial performance benchmarks using experienced healthcare professionals as a reference standard.
• To assess the perceived usefulness and applicability of VR training for real-world caregiving.

Main Methods:

• Observational study involving 75 healthcare professionals in Spain.
• Development of best practice guidelines and VR training materials for key home care tasks.
• Performance assessment in VR using a rubric with 205 predefined errors and post-training usability surveys.

Main Results:

• 75 professionals completed 257 simulations, identifying 13.3% of potential errors.
• Common errors included medication management, insulin administration, and hand hygiene.
• VR training showed high perceived usefulness (8.1/10) and applicability (85.3%).

Conclusions:

• Immersive VR training is a feasible and well-accepted method for educating informal caregivers.
• The study provides a benchmark for home caregiving task execution and supports targeted training interventions.
• Further research is needed to determine the long-term impact of VR training on caregiver competence and patient safety.