Abstract:

Family Approach is a Virtual Reality Learning Experience co-created by the Donation and Transplantation Institute (DTI) and Immersium Studio (IS) for the DTI learning programmes. It aims to provide health professionals with a realistic experience on breaking bad news to a family and request consent for organ and tissue donation. In such processes, soft skills, self confidence and the ability to manage your own emotions are key to successfully develop the task.

In this experience, the user is able to develop two roles. In first place, the user plays the role of the intensivist who needs to communicate the patient’s brain death to the family. In second place, the user plays the role of the transplant coordinator who needs to request family consent for organ and tissue donation. Thus we introduce role-switching in the experience to be able to provide an integral view and experience of the two main roles involved in the whole process.

The experience introduces the user in the moment when brain dead is confirmed and a briefing is done by one of the intensivists. Once this briefing is done, the user gets introduced to the transplant coordinator whom with the user must coordinate to properly face the breaking bad news part of the process. Previously to the family communication, the user must decide on the room configuration to properly generate an adequate environment for the family.

During the whole experience the user must make decisions on how to communicate with the family, in which order is he/she going to explain the information to the family, how to react in front of the family feedback he is getting in every moment and a sort of different situations in which each of the user’s decisions generates a different feedback and environment. So it is the user’s decisions which determine the course of the learning experience.

In such an environment, we promote failure from the user to see the consequences of usual mistakes done in this kind of process. The user receives personalized feedback on each of her/his decisions and is able to go back, change his/her decisions and compare consequences of different decisions. This way, the user is not just the center of the learning experience but he is the one determining the development of the learning experience.

The experience has been used by 40 students so far and they have rated it with 96 over 100 points.

Keywords:

Virtual Learning Experience, Interactive 360 video, interactive branching, breaking bad news