Leveraging Tech to Enhance Learning and Skills Development
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Leveraging Technology to Enhance Learning and Skills Development.
According to the NHS Workforce Plan which was published recently in June 2023, the UK government’s investment in education and training is planned to increase by £600 million over the next two years and a further £1.8 billion, on top of current training and educational budgets, within the next six. To ensure this investment is utilised in a productive way and meets the changing education needs of healthcare professionals, we will need to make use of digital and technological innovations as set out in 2019’s Topol Review.
One such, patent pending, technological innovation is the VR-AI Medsets® by IELTS Medical.
When it comes to virtual reality, as with any other virtual training tool, VR offers a safe and effective environment for trainee clinicians to learn crisis management and emergency preparation. It helps healthcare organisations to simulate realistic critical incidents and test the responsiveness and crisis strategy of the staff, whilst developing employees’ skills and confidence to handle real-life critical situations. It can help drive a new age of enterprise training, delivering an affordable, immersive, efficient experience to train the workforce on, amongst other things, soft skills.
In evidence from a recently conducted study by PWC, 40% of learners using virtual reality saw an improvement in confidence compared to in-person learners and a 35% improvement over e-learning solutions to demonstrate what they learned after training in VR.
Also, VR learning is the most cost-effective way of training employees when it is done on a large scale. The only problem is that as of now, input for most VR simulation out there is controlled by joystick or gamepad. For us, it did not seem feasible for trainee clinicians to learn how to, for example, provide injections using joystick control or to perfect the skill of suturing through a gamepad similar to that found on a console. As such, using our VR-AI Medsets®, learners have the opportunity to interact in the virtual world in the IELTS Medical way; via haptic glove controllers. Our systems have been developed using two different glove controllers: the TACTGLOVE by the excellent bHaptics and our very own patent pending VR Medi Gloves® – Leshara Rambukwella Edition.
In terms of AI, contrary to the established narratives of, “AI robots will steal our jobs,” Mark Britnell’s book titled Human Solving the Workforce Crisis in Healthcare, describes an end game of using AI to automate processes involved in routine but error prone tasks thus allowing clinical staff to “move up the food chain” and focus on building relationships with patients and managing their care. Day in and day out, IELTS Medical assesses trainee clinicians, producing digital reports for them and, in some cases, their employers. This useful feedback helps trainees to improve their skills and demonstrate this in, their regulators’ Test of Competence, for example.
Whilst delivering in person training, which is currently the most effective training method, we also actively promote leveraging tech via a two-pronged approach. In order for trainees to be able to gain knowledge and develop their skills, they need the opportunity to practice in one of a real or virtual clinical skills lab. For many trainees’ access to a real skills lab and the equipment they need to train can be difficult to gather, to help accessibility to our training we have built a virtual teaching hospital, can be used at scale via a portable headset. Then in order for their development to continue, trainees need access to high quality learning support from clinicians skilled in the art. Our real and virtual teaching environments give learners access to experienced expert clinical educators who are fully equipped and willing to provide such feedback. However, the high-quality feedback that most training providers offer is currently limited by the number of clinical educators on their teams. So, we asked the question: what if we could go from a 9 to 5 training capacity to a 24/7 training capacity? It turns out we can achieve this by utilising AI.
AI offers us the ability to free up clinical educators’ time and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the assessments of the next generation. The potential of AI is great, so it must be harnessed by capable minds. It is data intensive so any such exploration of this powerful resource, must be conducted with care and responsibility. Through the three-pronged approach of a major tech business that we partner with, we are prepared to complete this highly important task.
In sum and in response to addressing the clinical shortage in the NHS and private healthcare providers, we are actively engaged in harnessing VR and AI for the benefit of the healthcare sector in a bid to do our part to add more ready, willing and able clinicians to our wards.
