1 November 2022
Hello!
How is it the November blog already?!
We’ve been busy!!
I hope some of you will have watched the vlog from last month; it was a long video I know but honestly, there is so much to talk about it could have been a documentary if I’d have told you all I wanted to say! Did you spot Liz 2?? The sassy little avatar behind me strutting about?! This is just a taste, a very simple example of what can be done and then the applications of use of that avatar are vast!
We’ve had some training sessions with more planned this month and next. My colleague Ann Sunderland delivered a Clinical Decision-Making session to the PAs on our preceptorship and an Asthma session to our Nurse Educators with the use of an Oxford Medical Simulation (OMS) scenarios.
Early feedback from the PA group was mixed but as a result some have signed up to trial the software in their own time, so I think that’s promising. The Nurse Educators had a taster session of how an asthma training session could be facilitated using OMS and with an interactive quizzing app called Socrative, both went down well, and I think started some good conversations about the application of both into the Nurse VTS training sessions.
We talked about the platform iRIS too, which is a collaborative space for educators and training facilitators to create and share simulation-based teaching sessions. Something we believe would be useful as we grow.
Our bravest volunteer Heather from the Nurse Educators had the fully immersive experience and donned a headset whilst in an OMS scenario; she was fantastic and took to it straight away! Within only a matter of a minute she had completely settled into the situation, could handle the controls and was driving the scenario herself.
We have our ‘Hands On’ day on the 11th of November where we’re encouraging anyone with an interest to register and come and see the products for themselves. There are two more Clinical Decision-Making teaching sessions and a couple of facilitated sessions in December and January with the BodySwaps platform and we still have quite a few personal licences for anyone who’d like to help us evaluate them.
Sign up for the ‘Hands On’ day or get a Licence to use digital training tools
We’ve managed to connect with a couple of other HEE funded projects who would like us to be able test their products in South Yorkshire. One is the Virtual Clinical Experience platform which aims to provide larger capacity for observers to experience a patient consultation training session and the other is a Perinatal Mental Health AI tool designed to help anyone in training to be a Mental Health profession to practice a good conversation with a patient to get the best outcome. If these evaluate well, they could be something we adopt as a standard teaching tool.
Just knowing that the technology we’re testing now is a few years old means that I’m not aligning with one of our six principles (to remain at the forefront of technological advances) so it feels little counterintuitive. However, knowing and understanding what is possible now gives us a much better idea of what we could possibly do in the very near future and how we in Primary Care can shape it, make it bespoke for us and our needs.
A good example is the VR headset… at the moment it’s a bit bulky, takes up over half your face and can be heavy. We know that this is technology available that is a small camera on a pair of spectacles and using a ‘pen’ like a wand almost, you can bring objects into our reality, into your real space (Extended Reality). This means that you don’t lose the sense of where you are, of your ‘real’ surroundings and could reduce cyber sickness and any ill effects from use.
I’ve started to contemplate the financing of this mammoth undertaking too; the testing along with research of existing products and techniques should give us enough to make recommendations on what the business and operating model would be.
This in turn indicates the size, location and nature of the facility we need… but who is going to pay for that?
Do we look to have an NHSE/HEE and private enterprise partnership? From which industry would they come? Am I being realistic about this possibility?
Time will tell, but for now I know I need to have those conversations and whatever comes of them will require some hefty due diligence.
I hope you keep watching and following and do get in touch if you want to get involved.
Thank you!
Liz
