New Virtual Nursing Lab brings University of Regina students another way of learning

A new virtual reality lab at the U of R is helping students train for real-world clinical situations through immersive learning tools. Jacob Carr has more.

A ribbon cutting at the University of Regina on Thursday signaled the opening of a new virtual reality lab for nursing students.

Fourth year nursing student Tri Le is no stranger to the world of virtual reality, as he grew up using it for video games.

Now that it is being used across the country to train future nurses like himself, Li said the VR training is a great way to learn without the stresses of a real-world environment.

“Just being able to have like a virtual reality setting and having that controlled space where you’re allowed to make mistakes. and other people can learn from it.”

Robin Evans, Faculty of Nursing Interim Dean, said that several aspects of the VR training will translate directly to real life situations for the students.

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“They can talk to the patient; they can manipulate some equipment to a certain extent; they can simulate procedures. It’s quite a realistic environment considering it’s virtual reality.”

Last Mountain-Touchwood MLA Travis Keisig said the provincial government contributed $250,000 towards the funding of the virtual lab.

“This was something that was proposed by nurses that they thought would improve their ability,” he said.

“As a government, we’re very proud to partner with our educational partners on educating more nurses. That’s our goal is to have more nurses available to work in Saskatchewan.”

Le said he enrolled in the faculty because the province is in need of nurses and he wants to do his small part.

He also said the VR lab provides an exciting new way for himself and future students to receive their education.

“I want to be able to work on a hospital unit. Just to be able to help people, because I’ve always heard stories of nursing shortages and how nursing is always so stressed on how you to help people to solve. There’s such high turnover in nursing,” Le said.

Evans said the lab will allow nursing students to complete one quarter of their future clinical experience in a virtual setting, which will free up space in hospitals for real world training.

“If it was 100 hours, they could have up to 25 hours in the virtual reality lab. That would count towards that clinical experience,” she said.

“So, they would only have to spend 75 minutes in the clinical setting. So that gives us more and more space for other students to be there, because we have a fair number of students between all of the programs that are out there for all the different kinds of nurses in the province.”