VR-CARE: Virtual reality training for risk reduction in care homes
Why is this important?
Many care home residents are at risk of infections and falls, but there is often little training in these areas for care home staff. Virtual Reality (VR) is an exciting way of learning, where you can see a realistic computer-generated world when wearing a headset. This means that people can learn without distraction.
What are we trying to do?
We have received funding from the NIHR (NIHR166723) to develop and evaluate VR training for care home staff, focusing on hand hygiene and falls prevention, with scope to extend the topics in the future. Our aim is to discover whether VR training can improve the care home staff learning experience, reduce infections, prevent or reduce falls and help staff feel valued in their jobs, and therefore want to stay working for the care home. We also need to understand how to best implement it and to evaluate whether the training provides value for money in preventing falls and reducing infections and staff turnover.
How are we doing it?
First, we will create the VR training programme and toolkit. This will be informed by interviews with 20 senior care home staff members and VR training providers. We will then involve up to 15 care home staff in testing it. They will give feedback using surveys and short interviews. From their feedback, we will improve the training and toolkit.
Second, we will do a pilot study, where we will test the outcome of some care homes using the training and other care homes not. We will have 80 staff members from 6 care homes involved. We will collect data on how easy it was to recruit and retain participants, benefits for residents, costs, if it makes people feel dizzy, what people learn, how confident they feel about hand hygiene and identifying falls risks; and the best way to collect this information. We will also interview 20 participants to learn how to implement the training.
Who are we working with?
We work closely with a group of care home staff and visitors (including residents’ families). SentiraXR a spin-out company based at the University of Manchester is developing the VR training.
Professor Dawn Dowding is the PI and Dr Norina Gasteiger and Dr Claire Ford are co-leading the project. Our team also includes Dr Helen Hawley-Hague, Prof Emma Stanmore, Dr Jack Wilkinson, Dr Akbar Ullah and Mrs Debra Jones from the University of Manchester, Dr William Whittaker (University of Liverpool), Prof Roman Kislov (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Dr Louise Laverty (University of Leeds).