Co-design VR communication scenarios with nurse educators and technology developers, incorporating authentic clinical cases and language resources¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 4 claims (4 for) · 3 studies (2 qualitative, 1 review), q2 · 0 of 3 report an effect size · 4 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The review recommends close collaboration between nurse educators and technology developers to address the realism gap. Educators can provide developers with an immersive understanding of clinical urgency and contribute by co-designing VR scenarios rooted in authentic clinical cases, including challenging communications during conflicts, resuscitation, or management of pain and psychological distress. Developers and educators could also incorporate essential language components or AI-driven natural language processing generating dynamic, multilingual clinical scenarios.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Close collaboration between nurse educators and technology developers

Constraints¶

• The review notes the swift pace of VR hardware and software innovation may limit the long-term relevance of current technical capabilities

Target Learners¶

• undergraduate nursing students

Target Learning Goals¶

• communication skills in authentic clinical scenarios
• communication with non-native speakers

Claims¶

• VR communication training faces challenges of scenario realism, lack of clinical urgency in virtual characters, and language barriers [+W]
• Nursing students express needs for optimized VS technology and cases: more diverse scenarios, greater realism, multilingual support, flexible training content, and culturally contextualized cases [+W]
• The closer training content is to authentic clinical scenarios, the smoother its translation into practice [+W]
• The most frequently reported challenge of virtual simulation teaching is its lack of realism, alongside operational complexity, English-language demands, cultural mismatch, and adverse physical reactions [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Design and implement VS teaching with simplified interfaces, multimodal feedback, multilingual diverse case libraries, pre-training, and controlled VR session lengths

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Deng Jing, Tan Yifei, Chen Jing, Guo Xiujing, Wang Ling, Xie Chuan. (2025). Virtual reality simulation to teach communication for undergraduate nursing students: a scoping review. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-025-08450-7