Wm. LeRoy Heinrichs
Publication Details
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Training Healthcare Personnel for Mass Casualty Incidents in a Virtual Emergency Department; VED II
Pre-hospital and Disaster Medicine. 2010; (5): 422-434
A Virtual Emergency Department (VED II) designed after the Stanford University Medical Centers ED was the clinical environment for IRB-approved formative studies of learning about the clinical management of CBRNE exposed groups of virtual patients. Ten physicians with an average of four years of post-training experience, and 12 nurses with an average of 9.5 years of ED experience at Stanford University Medical Center, and San Mateo County Medical Center participated in the study. All individuals were provided electronic information about the clinical features of a nerve toxin and radioactive blast exposures before the study date, and an orientation to the game interface, and opportunity to practice using it immediately prior to the study. An exit questionnaire was conducted with a Likert Scale test instrument. Among these trainees, two-thirds of who had prior Code Triage training, and one-half had prior CBRNE training, about two-thirds felt immersed in the virtual world much or all of the time. Prior to the training, only four trainees were confident about managing mass casualty incidents of these types, but after the training, nineteen felt either confident or very confident: thirteen attributed this change to practicing in the virtual ED. Not surprisingly, twenty-one of the trainees reported that the scenarios were useful for improving healthcare team skills training, the primary objective for creating them. But a surprising response was that eighteen trainees believed that the cases were also instructive in learning about clinical skills management of such incidents. These data suggest that training healthcare teams in virtual worlds with dynamic virtual patients is an effective method of training for management of mass casualty events, particularly for uncommonly occurring incidents.
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