Virtual Reality Simulation for Disaster Preparedness Training in Hospitals: Integrated Review

BACKGROUND: A critical component of disaster preparedness in hospitals is experiential education and training of health care professionals. A live drill is a well-established, effective training approach, but cost restraints and logistic constraints make clinical implementation challenging, and training opportunities with live drills may be severely limited. Virtual reality simulation (VRS) technology may offer a viable training alternative with its inherent features of reproducibility, just-in-time training, and repeatability. OBJECTIVE: This integrated review examines the scientific evidence pertaining to the effectiveness of VRS and its practical usefulness in training health care professionals for in-hospital disaster preparedness. METHODS: A well-known 4-stage methodology was used for the integrated review process. It consisted of problem identification, a literature search and inclusion criteria determination, 2-stage validation and analysis of searched studies, and presentation of findings. A search of diverse publication repositories was performed. They included Web of Science (WOS), PubMed (PMD), and Embase (EMB). RESULTS: The integrated review process resulted in 12 studies being included. Principle findings identified 3 major capabilities of VRS: (1) to realistically simulate the clinical environment and medical practices related to different disaster scenarios, (2) to develop learning effects on increased confidence and enhanced knowledge acquisition, and (3) to enable cost-effective implementation of training programs. CONCLUSIONS: The findings from the integrated review suggested that VRS could be a competitive, cost-effective adjunct to existing training approaches. Although the findings demonstrated the applicability of VRS to different training scenarios, these do not entirely cover all disaster scenarios that could happen in hospitals. This integrated review expects that the recent advances of VR technologies can be 1 of the catalysts to enable the wider adoption of VRS training on challenging clinical scenarios that require sophisticated modeling and environment depiction.