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Usage and function familiarisation with Zoll series defibrillation units.
Many people are trained in Basic Life Support techniques, such as CPR, which are designed to maintain life until help is available. Hospital clinicians are trained in Advanced Life Support (ALS) techniques, which maintain life and also identify and resolve the cause of the cardiac arrest, so that a normal rhythm is restored.
Cardiac arrests don’t happen very often but are life or death events. Because the standard of care in hospitals is constantly improving, cardiac arrests are occurring less often. As a result, hospital clinicians are receiving less exposure to managing cardiac arrests but are still required to perform effectively as a team when they do occur.
During a cardiac arrest, an ALS Team Leader organizes a number of clinicians (Airway, Drugs, Scribe, Defib, Compressions) to manage the resuscitation. The Team Leader must ensure critical tasks are performed to maintain life while using the Australian Resuscitation Guidelines to identify the cause of the cardiac arrest.
Currently standard ALS Team Leader training is delivered in a clinical simulation lab with a sophisticated mannequin or a staff member substituting for the patient. This process is time consuming and labour intensive. Additionally when providing the assessment process at the culmination of the day or for mandatory annual re-accreditation the team roles are represented by two clinical educators, an unrealistic reproduction of a real ALS event.
For this reason, the Western Sydney Local Health District, Sydney University and the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network have partnered with Frameless Interactive to build a Virtual Reality training app called ALS-SimVR. This app is undergoing clinical trials to measure how effective it is for training an ALS Team Leader, compared to current practice.
Many people are trained in Basic Life Support techniques, such as CPR, which are designed to maintain life until help is available. Hospital clinicians are trained in Advanced Life Support (ALS) techniques, which maintain life and also identify and resolve the cause of the cardiac arrest, so that a normal rhythm is restored.
During a cardiac arrest, an ALS Team Leader organizes a number of clinicians (Airway, Drugs, Scribe, Defib, Compressions) to manage the resuscitation. The Team Leader must ensure critical tasks are performed to maintain life while using the Australian Resuscitation Guidelines to identify the cause of the cardiac arrest.
Currently standard ALS Team Leader training is delivered in a clinical simulation lab with a sophisticated mannequin or a staff member substituting for the patient. This process is time consuming and labour intensive. Additionally when providing the assessment process at the culmination of the day or for mandatory annual re-accreditation the team roles are represented by two clinical educators, an unrealistic reproduction of a real ALS event.
For this reason, the Western Sydney Local Health District, Sydney University and the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network have partnered with Frameless Interactive to build a Virtual Reality training app called ALS-SimVR. This app is undergoing clinical trials to measure how effective it is for training an ALS Team Leader, compared to current practice.
Since the widespread implementation of early identification of deterioration programs, cardiac arrests are becoming less frequent inpatient populations.
However, when they do occur, they can have catastrophic consequences if not appropriately managed. As a result of the reduction in cardiac arrest rates there is a corresponding reduction in the exposure of medical and nursing staff to the management of these patients. This in turn means that there a fewer opportunity for staff to consolidate the required skills putting more emphasis on simulation-based training.
The delivery of initial and refresher training andre-accreditation for ALS teams is a resource intensive challenge faced by hospitals globally. The face-to-face training often involves significant time spent both in skills stations and debriefing exploring and teaching specific technical aspects of ALS management.
There will always be a need for teams to manage patients inextremus and the challenge is how to facilitate cost-effective and on-going training for the skills required for this low frequency yet high stakes event.
Based on the extensive evidence for the efficacy of virtualreality (VR) for skills training, we suggest that ongoing ALS education andre-accreditation could be enhanced using bespoke VR based training
Utilizing skills established over many years delivering ALStraining we have developed a hi-fidelity prototype, ALS-SimVR, using the lateststand-alone Oculus Quest headset. The reduced ongoing costs, flexibility andscalability of portable VR allows such an application to have an impact both in the national and international sectors
We have already performed a pilot study for ALS-SimVR with a group of senior health professionals. All participants reported very positive experiences with the prototype and the project has gained significant interest from clinicians, Universities, and industry partners.
The application prototype won the Users' Choice Award at the International VRST conference in 2019 and more recently, our presentation of initial user testing won the Emerging Researchers award at eHealth2020 in the social media and disruptive technology stream.
We have completed an initial user study exploring the user needs of clinicians utilising VR for ALS training which is currently being finalised for publication.
The findings of this study have guided the on going development of the application. Ethics approval has been established for a study exploring contributing factors for knowledge acquisition in VR to help better understand appropriate recommendations for utilisation of the application for clinician training. Future research will aim to validate ALS-SimVR as an educational tool and then progress to validation as an assessment tool.
Our goal is to firstly make this application free for the public health system across Australia and then build upon the interest we have had to develop international partners to make the necessary changes to meet international requirements
Using AI within our
Day after day another instance of a patient or a visitor attacking medical staff is reported, with the zeitgeist surrounding the current pandemic these events are occurring with increased frequency and fervor.
Providing a safe space to practice these types of interactions in an effort to identify and de-escalate persons before a codeblack alarm is called to either avoid the incident or delay the would be assailant giving security precious time to respond.
Providing the space, time, and resources for access to training equipment is doubly difficult when that equipment must be shared within an entire organisation. Our familiarity trainers are designed to give virtual access to interactive working versions of the same hardware and devices that are deployed in many medical setting across australia and the world.
We have partnered with Zoll to provide familiarity trainers for a number of their products removing many of these barriers to these devices that are present in the day to day operations.
