Education
Simulated midwifery
Thanks to a new virtual reality tool created at the University of Newcastle, midwifery students’ first experience of neonatal resuscitation no longer needs to be a confronting real-life situation on a maternity ward.
Speaking at the NSWNMA’s Annual Conference in July, researchers Donovan Jones and Shanna Fealy explained how students are now immersing themselves in a virtual simulation of a labour ward where they can practise their resuscitation skills.
The technology, which works in real time using simulated clinical data, enables students to learn safely, Donovan says.
“I want people to be able to ‘fail safely’, to go back and look at the analytics and the data they collect when they go through these training scenarios.”
Shanna notes that it is “getting harder to avail our students of clinical experiences, and we can’t simulate them all using task trainers [lifelike models]”.
For some students, their first introduction to complicated births “is the abrupt reality of an actual procedure, which can be confronting”.
The technology they have developed means that students at the University of Newcastle, where they lecture, can explore virtual simulations using headsets purchased from JB Hi-Fi for about $130 and attached to a normal smartphone, says Donovan.
“Bachelor of midwifery students can take them home and have an absolutely immersive experience.”
Working with IT and coding experts, Donovan and Shanna developed this technology when they saw how quickly the educational landscape was changing. Students in classes use their smart phones “to Google and fact check” instantly, Shanna says.
While the clinical environment can give ad hoc training, students have been seeking other ways to “fill their gaps in training” using sources such as YouTube.
Students learn at their own pace
The problem is that not all the online information students can access is verifiable. With some 2000 pregnancy-related apps available for download, there is a “saturation of information”, Shanna said. But the information available is not necessarily “evidence based”.
“Using virtual worlds to teach our students is empowering,” she says. “Students love that they can download the app and do it anytime and anywhere.”
Donovan says that the flexibility of virtual learning, which students can do at home, “allows people to learn at their own pace”.
The simulated midwifery environments are developed by clinicians and coding specialists working closely together over a 12-week development period. The technology has also been used to develop a virtual reality simulation of a 40-week gestation. Called Road to Birth, it takes users on a journey throughout a pregnancy. They see a life-size female figure in front of them whose gestation can be explored and observed.
The program allows users to investigate the internal changes as the baby develops, and it incorporates a pregnancy timeline, key anatomy and circulatory systems, as well as expert commentary from experienced midwives at each stage of pregnancy.
Students gain experience about crucial birth considerations like the baby’s orientation and placental positioning.
Donovan says the program helps first-year students who otherwise go out into real-life situations feeling confronted and underprepared.
“At the moment we teach with dolls and pelvises, and I can tell you first hand from being a student as well as an educator, the position of the placenta is one of the hardest things to learn, and yet it’s absolutely one of the most imperative things to know.
“If a midwife can’t identify its position and lets the woman go into natural labour with the baby obstructed, the baby’s life is at serious risk – simple as that.”
Australia is leading the world
They say pregnant women are also captivated by possibilities of bridging the gap between what the health professionals tell them … and having access to an internal view of pregnancy.
“We can sit down with an iPad and a first-time pregnant mum and talk about positioning, download a link and put it on their smartphone,” Donovan says.
The pair are currently developing a virtual reality teaching game that simulates conflict resolution in the clinical environment, which Donovan says represents “one quarter of what we do every day”.
“The unit takes your biofeedback, so as you learn to actually calm someone down, it is … feeding that back into the scenarios. So if you don’t calm down it gets harder and harder to progress through the game.”
The technology is moving fast, he said: “We now have the technology to put gloves on and touch the baby in virtual reality and feel the temperature.”
He sees endless possibilities for “how you can actually pull some of the biometrics out and how you can adapt that [for use] post-natal and pre-natal as well.”
Their work is attracting interest from around the world, according to Donovan.
“Australia is first in the world, we’re not following, we’re leading.”
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