Community Simulation Utilising Mixed Reality (MR)

The scope of this project is to identify if mixed reality (MR) can support simulating the complexities of differing community environments compared to traditional physical structure simulated environments. Concurrent with this, the aim is to establish if mixed reality can produce a safe learning and reflective environment for community staff to develop their skills. This could potentially improve patient outcome and support healthcare teams to deliver safe effective care. Simulation is a technique for practice and learning to replace and amplify real experiences with guided ones, and are often immersive in nature. Simulation is a safe, learning environment, that encourages participants to reflect on the situation. Mixed reality is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environment and visualisation where physical and digital objects can co-exist and interact in real time.

For sustainability of the health and social care sector, the long term aim is to facilitate people's healthcare needs in the community. Such increased community services will require staff with holistic skills to work as independent practitioners. Simulation in the acute setting is currently provided by the simulation team in the Trust's dedicated simulation suite, and through in-situ simulations within individual departments. The scenarios for these simulations can be created due to the repetitive and clinical nature of the environments required. Since becoming an integrated care organisation, the need to provide simulation based learning to all staff, including those who are out in community settings has arisen. In order to create a realistic learning environment for community based staff, there is a need to recreate an individual's home, accounting for all of the different environments the investigator's patients live in, such as a small residence with tight spaces, differing levels of cleanliness and the addition of pets, which is very difficult using traditional simulation methods. The need to develop an innovative way of delivering community based simulation is therefore important, to allow all staff access to valuable simulation based learning while providing a safe and supportive environment to practice both technical and non-technical skills.

The investigator proposes to run two simulations per week resulting in undertaking a total of 34 simulations. One of these will be using traditional methods of simulation, and the other will be using mixed reality. Using traditional methods, physical items will be used to recreate the community environment. It can be costly, time consuming and difficult to achieve the desired environment. Mixed reality provides the option of quickly immersing participants into different environments,allowing participants to experience all of the features. This makes it a very useful to method to compare to traditional methods of simulation, as the outcomes could be potentially be more realistic. The investigator will use questionnaires to get feedback from participants, both before, and after they have taken part in the simulation. This feedback will be used to determine if participants feel more confident and competent from traditional methods of simulation or mixed reality based simulation. It will also assess which environment they feel creates a more realistic environment to learn in. Qualitative data will be collected by those participants who choose to take part in a semi-structured interview. Alongside collecting data from participants the simulation technicians will also be asked via a face to face approach to attend a semi-structured interview regarding the feasibility and adaptable of both simulations. This is voluntary. As although participants feedback is important it is also essential that the technician feedback is included as they will be the ones that have to assist with running the simulations. The semi-structured interviews will be undertaken similar to participants semi-structured interviews, with written consent forms, recording of interview and confidentiality. However the questions will be different. They will be given a participant information sheet when they are approached. Evidence suggests that simulation based learning improves confidence; although there is limited research available that combines simulation based learning and mixed reality. As mixed reality could provide high fidelity simulations, it is an area which requires much needed research.