Nursing education utilizing experiences in a virtual hospital ward

Abstract

Environmental design should be required at medical facilities for conducting medical practice safely and for making hospitalization comfortable. Many medical nursing students cannot imagine medical facilities, especially hospital wards, when they study medical environments in a basic nursing lecture. As a result, they cannot connect well with patient assistance. We employed a computer assisted designing software, "3D My Home Designer" (Mega Soft Company) that runs on Windows 8, and considered the usefulness of it for lectures on environmental design showing how to design a hospital ward for patients' optimal hospital stay. We drew a medical facility in 2-D first, transformed it into 3D images, and then created movies of a virtual hospital ward in which a patient walked around. These movies consisted of 3 kinds: a) hospital room with changeable wall color, b) different allocations of hospital room and nurse station, and c) a blurred ward which corresponded to how a patient with poor eyesight (cataract) would see a ward. We prepared as controls: a') still images of a hospital room, b') still images of ward, and c') a documentation on how a ward is seen by a patient with a cataract. We gave a questionnaire to students and nurses about these movies and still images (controls). In a) and b), there were no differences between the movies and still images in both students and nurses. In c), both students and nurses had a viewpoint from the patient with poor eyesight. From these results, we consider that the students, who have fewer experiences in a hospital, may understand the environments well by movies and the application of a virtual movie ward to nursing education may be useful in a lecture, depending on the readiness of the students.