Imperial College Islands Tour Part 2

Medical School

Medical School Island

This postgraduate medical school in Second Life is Imperial College’s virtual hospital where professionals can train and rehearse and patients can learn about healthcare facilities and procedures that they might need to use.

Medical School is located in the SciLands, a Second Life continent dedicated to Science and Technology. Neighboring islands include the UK’s National Health Service Auditorium, the US National Library of Medicine’s ToxTown, North Michigan University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and Imperial College’s Second Health project for NHS London (Tour part 1).

Clinical Scenarios for Patient Safety

Clinical Scenarios Wing

Here we are researching Second Life’s use as a novel platform for in-service training using simulated clinical environments and tricky situations. Our work here will enable hospital staff to learn and practice in a safe environment, without risk to patient safety.

Orientation Room

Training Ward

Starting at the Orientation Room, experimental subjects (trained nurses) proceed to the training ward, where a patient is about to experience a life threatening event. 82% of nurses who used this simulation would recommend its use for nursing students. See what you think.
Download a guide with instructions.
This wing also contains a social area, library and a large auditorium which is sometimes used as an overflow for the main NHS Auditorium.

Virtual Operating Rooms

Virtual Operating Room

For this study we modelled the layout and contents of the operating rooms at St Mary’s hospital in London and created a Theatre Induction Curriculum for introducing undergraduate medical students to the operating theatre before their first encounter with a real one. A Quicktime movie can be downloaded here showing a typical induction tour.

Visitors can speak to a Virtual Patient chatbot in the recovery ward. This and other technologies are used to create virtual patients for medical students to interact with.

Patient Experience in Brighton

Taking Blood Pressure

We are currently developing a patient-centred virtual world experience intended to help NHS staff gain valid consent from patients with learning disability. People with learning disabilities learn best from multimodal experiences and immersive virtual reality has been shown to support learning. We will use a virtual hospital experience to discover if we can enhance recall and understanding. After exposure the user’s understanding will be tested by a form of non-directive interview technique. The Economist has just run an article on the study featuring our partners at the University of Brighton, Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and the Grace Eyre Foundation.

This work is funded by the NIHR Invention for Innovation (i4i) programme.

Second Health in Health Service Journal

Journalist Daloni Carlisle discusses our use of Second Life to research how virtual reality can impact health and health services. Read Article

Catch-up Posting

I haven’t completed a blog entry for 6 months so in the interests of keeping the blog current I have at least updated My Presentations page. There have of course been lots of virtual world developments – too many for me to comment on here.

Stanford’s Metaverse U conference comes to the SciLands

The SciLands Skyditorium is host to Metaverse U, Stanford University’s first Metaverse conference this weekend (Feb 16th and 17th). Full details here: attend-all-of-metaverse-u-virtually-free and see the agenda here. As described in New World Notes virtual attendees can save travel time, money and the climate! Speaker Christian Renaud has pledged not to use RL air travel for any meetings this year, or to pay $1000 per flight to the Nature Conservancy Council if he does. I’m following his lead by staying at home to attend this mustn’t miss conference. That means I’ll also save on car emissions as I won’t be travelling anywhere this weekend.

If you don’t yet have a Second Life account now is the time to get one. Register for free at the SciLands site and take our 10 minute orientation experience, directly adjacent to the Skyditorium.