Dr. Gilberto Salazar of Southwestern Utah State University (left) and Dr. Todd Polk of the University of Utah at Dallas have collaborated to develop a virtual reality tool to train healthcare professionals on how to respond to workplace violence.
Newswise – DALLAS – January 10, 2023 – Innovative Virtual Reality (VR) Educational Tool Developed by UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Emergency Medicine Department in Collaboration with UT Dallas Could Soon Play a Major Role in Helping Physicians Identify Potential Violence-Related Issues and respond to them. meeting with the patient.
The training tool puts doctors in a virtual hospital exam room and presents a series of real-life patient encounters, allowing them to practice proven de-escalation strategies. Efforts to develop the plan come amid growing threats to healthcare workers across the country.
The latest data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that healthcare workers are five times more likely than workers in other industries to experience workplace violence, which can range from verbal abuse to physical abuse.
Due to the stress and distress associated with many emergency room visits, physicians and emergency room staff are more vulnerable to patient aggression than their counterparts in other healthcare settings. A 2022 survey by the American College of ER Physicians found that 85 percent of ER physicians reported an increase in ER violence over the past five years. Two-thirds of the nearly 3,000 emergency room doctors surveyed reported assaults in the past year.
“The constant exposure to workplace violence is detrimental to the physical and mental health of healthcare workers,” said Gilberto Salazar, MD, assistant professor of emergency medicine and the College of Health Professions. “As healthcare professionals, we have a responsibility to find better ways to address this issue. With the help of virtual reality, we can immerse users in real life and teach them the most effective solutions.”
Three UTSW Emergency Medicine Residents — Andrew Stratton, MD, Maria Box, MD, and Philip Jarrett, MD — have developed evidence-based training courses based on a wide range of disciplines, including emergency medicine, nursing, psychiatry, and pharmacology . The course includes instructions on how to recognize the early signs of aggression and alleviate situations involving aggressive people.
To develop the virtual reality program, the team partnered with UT Dallas’ UTDesign program, which connects North Texas companies and organizations with UT Dallas’ cutting-edge engineering and computer science students to solve engineering problems.
Dr. Todd Polk, director of design at UT Bioengineering, said the goal was to develop a tool that not only allowed users to enter a patient’s room, but also allowed users to “feel” what was happening. This is achieved through the inclusion of tactile feedback vests and gloves that mimic the sense of touch and virtual reality headsets.
“When a virtual entity hits you in the chest, you really feel like you’re being hit,” Dr. Polk said. “You get physical feedback that matches the virtual reality image.”
PhD. Salazar and Polk began collaborating in 2020 on a project that received a $10,000 Modeling Innovation Award from UT Southwestern for continued development.
The project was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to further investigate workplace violence in the healthcare sector and compare the effectiveness of the tool with other training methods. Austin-based Augmented Training Systems is developing the next iteration of its virtual reality training modules. It will be used in IRB research and has the potential to become a key element in the training of physicians and staff at Southwestern UT and other organizations.
UT Southwestern is one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, combining cutting-edge biomedical research with excellence in clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty have received six Nobel Prizes, including 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 18 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. More than 2,900 full-time faculty members are responsible for pioneering medical advances and strive to rapidly transform scientific research into new clinical treatments. Physicians at UT Southwestern serve over 100,000 inpatients in over 80 specialties, handle over 360,000 emergency cases, and oversee nearly 4 million outpatient visits each year.
Newswise provides journalists with access to breaking news and a platform for universities, institutions and journalists to distribute breaking news to their audiences.
Post time: Jan-11-2023