Teaching nursing to rural high schoolers? Virtual reality makes it possible

LE SUEUR, MINN. – Porter Simonette carefully placed a dollop of digital hand sanitizer on the hands of the elderly man he saw inside his virtual reality headset. The high school senior mimed opening a container of yogurt, and following the on-screen instructions, began feeding his digital patient.

“Here’s some more yogurt,” he said, before asking, “You want some water?”

Simonette is part of a class of nine students at Le Sueur-Henderson High School, a school district about 60 miles southwest of Minneapolis. The class started using VR headsets this year to help students become certified nursing assistants in a bid to combat a dire shortage of nursing in the state.

As Simonette and others donned their VR headsets, Amanda Bell chimed in remotely from a laptop screen from her home in Indianapolis. Bell is part of a program helping 13 school districts in Minnesota’s rural south-central region provide nursing instruction.

Smaller school districts often don’t have the staff to teach specialized skills such as nursing, Bell said. And some of the students in the program, such as those in the Maple River School District 20 miles south of Mankato, have had to drive about an hour for in-person training.

“I have students where it’s not feasible for them to drive to an onsite location to practice their hands-on skills,” Bell said. “Being able to provide VR as a form of practice for them allows that kind of access that they otherwise wouldn’t have.”

A few of the students at the class at Le Sueur-Henderson said they just wanted to check out nursing. Others are like Simonette, who while still in high school has a vision of having a career in health care. Some students already work at long-term care facilities in the area.

After putting on the headset, the students see themselves inside of a virtual room with a resident in a long-term care facility. The program, though wonky at times, then guides them as they work through tasks such as helping the resident stand up from a wheelchair. Text boxes pop up in the student’s vision, telling them to lock the wheelchair brakes, and then tighten a gait belt, before helping the resident get up from the wheelchair. As students move their hands to mimic tightening the belt, sensors reflect their actions on screen.

At times, Simonette struggled with the virtual reality controls, grabbing the air fruitlessly as he tried to progress. “This is what you asked for, what are you talking about?” he tells the program. But Simonette said he feels no embarrassment waving his arms around with a headset on, if it’s in the pursuit of his dreams of a career in healthcare.

“VR is a great middle ground where it’s a lot more interactive and real than say, an online course, but it’s also a lot easier than hands-on,” Simonette said, after cruising through a list of tasks in the program.

There’s some research to back up the use of VR in medical training: a paper in 2023 from the Pennsylvania College of Technology suggests that full-immersion virtual reality simulation made nursing students’ anxiety levels go down.

Another student, Ashley Miller, said she appreciated how the virtual reality course forced her to memorize critical steps. The program, in training mode, does not let you progress until you accurately replicate what you’re supposed to do. And if you mess up – “you’re not hurting anybody,” said Miller, a senior.

Cindy Schmidt, principal at Le Sueur-Henderson, said she sees the VR program as part of the school’s “career-connected learning” approach. The school district has classes to help students become nurses, emergency medical responders and welders.

The VR class at Le Sueur-Henderson is funded through a regional career and technical education grant, part of $10 million in state funds to what are known as Minnesota Service Cooperatives.

Le Sueur, like many other rural cities in Minnesota, needs nurses, Schmidt said. About 11% of nursing jobs in the state were vacant in Minnesota’s hospitals and affiliated clinics last year. This is an improvement over the previous year but still up significantly from the 3% vacancy rate before the pandemic in 2019, according to the Minnesota Hospital Association’s annual workforce survey.

Schmidt said students tell her they want to stay in the area, and the school wants to help them find the jobs that are needed locally.

“We’re holding the future talent right here in our schools,” Schmidt said. “And so when you think about how are we best preparing them for the jobs of the future – let’s get them jobs now so that they can be prepared for whatever it is they choose to do.”