Western Health and Viewport XR Prepare Frontline Health Workers for Challenging Interactions with VR Safety Training

Frontline health workers often endure high-pressure and high-risk work environments to provide vital services and ensure that patients receive the best quality of care possible. Sadly a massive 95% of healthcare workers have experienced verbal or physical assault at work, according to WorkSafe Victoria. As part of extensive staff support measures, here’s how Western Health and Viewport XR developed tools to help employees.

In this case study we dive into the amazing work from Western Health and Viewport XR which resulted in Western Health’s Operations Manager, Elisa Ilarda, saying, “An incredible outcome and more than we could ever have imagined!”

Julius Jeppe from Viewport XR said, “Healthcare professionals do incredible work, and face extraordinary challenges. We set out to develop truly emotion-inducing experiences, and we pushed the technology to deliver a new level of realism. The feedback has blown us away, and it’s fantastic that we are able to help employees and patients to be safe.”

The challenge

Western Health is a principal healthcare provider in Victoria, Australia. It has a comprehensive and integrated range of clinical services, covering a combination of hospital, community-based and in-reach services to aged, adult, pediatric and newborn patients. Western Health employs over 11,000 staff across four acute public hospitals and six health centres in one of the fastest growing and most diverse regions in the country.
With the sheer range of services provided by Western Health, and the broad patient base, there are endless unique scenarios that employees face every single day. And the unfortunate truth is that in highly emotional situations, patients and their families/friends can misdirect their feelings towards Western Health employees.

As part of wide-reaching ways to help employees with this abuse, Western Health turned to Viewport XR, to develop realistic VR-based training scenarios. Viewport XR is a leading creative studio based in Perth, Australia which specialises in spatial visualisation, extended reality experiences and immersive training across a range of industries, from resources and energy to healthcare and education.

Training large workforces is always a challenge, and that’s amplified when it’s an industry like healthcare, where employees deal with a wide range of people in highly emotional situations. Traditional training – whether that’s written, videos, or even role-play – is effective to an extent, but can fall short of recreating what it’s like to be in the actual moment.

Problem solving

So Western Health and Viewport XR looked at how they could build a realistic and varied training environment, while still keeping staff safe from harm. Viewport XR created a VR-based training simulator called Reframe Your Response, using lightweight and portable VIVE hardware. It’s designed around hyper-realistic visuals, which are much more immersive for staff than classroom learning. And because it’s VR, it means endless scenarios can be created, not reliant on props or locations or colleagues having to roleplay. This allows frontline health workers to test their understanding of occupational violence and aggression best practices in a safe environment.

Reframe Your Response takes things to the next level, providing an insight into the perspectives of both staff members and patients during moments of escalated tensions. And it uses dynamic dialogue and motion-captured performances to demonstrate how ‘reframing your response’ can positively impact aggressive interactions and ensure a safer outcome for all.

The decision was made to deploy the product on the VIVE Focus 3 and VIVE XR Elite due to their versatility, audio-visual quality which could deliver realistic graphics, remote management capabilities and ability to accommodate several of Viewport XR’s tried and tested pipelines and processes.

How it was built

Western Health provided close guidance on the scenarios and experiences which were built, and then refined each version Viewport XR built, to ultimately deliver a world-class training tool. One training scenario involves an agitated hospital visitor, and was designed to elicit genuine emotional reactions. The heartbreak and emotional angst in the actor and character’s performance was such that literal tears would occasionally be shed during the scene from trainees. For the team at Viewport XR, this project marked their first foray into implementing highly realistic human characters who could display a broad spectrum of dynamic emotions, expressions and mannerisms in an immersive soft skills training environment. This was accomplished through exploring and leveraging two emerging technologies: Unreal’s MetaHuman realistic person creator and Rokoko performance capture technology.

Realistic visuals were critical to the project, because the training has to feel real. If the graphics were too stylised, trainees would feel like they’re in a video game.

Deployment and ease-of-use

Traditionally, running training sessions for such a large workforce across so many sites would be a huge endeavour, requiring a training team to travel around the region. With the use of VIVE Focus 3 and VIVE XR Elite headsets, it means training can take place anywhere, at any time. Now training sessions are much more flexible, with timeslots available for employees to sign-up to, instead of mandatory training days for large groups.

The headsets are set to ‘kiosk mode’ which means users can only access the training experience – so there’s no technical expertise required, and no way for users to get lost in the UI. What’s more, users don’t even need controllers, they can rely on accurate and intuitive hand-tracking. Viewport XR and Western Health can manage devices remotely. VIVE Focus 3 and VIVE XR Elite are based on Android, and are compatible with most legacy UEM/fleet management tools – this makes it easy to remotely update and administer devices across the entire fleet, whether that’s ten devices or a thousand.

Immediate impact

It’s always best to conduct empirical research to compare training methods, but anecdotal evidence from the training days can also hint at the immediate impact.

One of the powerful examples in “Reframe Your Response” is when trainees can see what it’s like for some patients to experience hallucinations. Trainees were not told ahead of time what they would see, and were shocked to be able to see things from the patient’s point-of-view, giving a new understanding of the stress these patients endure.

Western Health has seen benefits already, with more variety and realistic training scenarios, which can be deployed without increasing costs while also saving time. And most of all, it means that employees can learn in a totally secure environment.

What’s next?

Reframe Your Response is already garnering interest elsewhere. Western Health has partnered with Deakin University to formally measure the impact of the training and has just won a $50,000 grant to provide an evaluation of the education package. This will include pre and post training measures, interviews and surveys at various intervals post training.