Available now, Virtual Veins is a virtual reality training simulator using haptics to allow Healthcare
Practitioners to acquire, develop and maintain the skills necessary to perform venepuncture in a range of
realistic scenarios within a safe controlled environment. A growing number of healthcare practitioners
across a range of disciplines for nursing, paramedics, the blood transfusion service to Sports Specialists
need to be able to gain confidence and competence in vascular access.
Virtual Veins also provides metrics to allow the measuring of performance in venepuncture and as
an aid to certification for IV access via this state of the art medical simulation.
Virtual Veins for Tutors
With Virtual Veins tutors can:
- Organise, add and view users.
- Set up or tailor courses/programs of learning.
- Add users or groups of users to learning programs.
- Set targets and benchmark standards for trainees to achieve.
- Assess results and learning outcomes.
- Add their own materials or amend those provided.
- Add their own clinical protocols and preferences for the order of the tasks within a procedure.
- Set up interactive question and answer sessions.
- View results and hone in on any student needing one to one help
- Allow students to practise for as long as needed without the mounting costs of disposables
Virtual Veins for Venepuncture Trainees
With Virtual Veins trainees can:
- Practise or hone their clinical skills in Venepuncture until confident and competent.
- Achieve predetermined standards of competency.
- Provide evidence of their competency with clinical metrics and summary reports.
- Practise in a safe virtual enviroment with no risk to patients and where mistakes can be
made and learnt from.
- Feel a realistic 'pop' feedback when the needle is correctly inserted in the vein.
- Step through a procedure indicating the order of the tasks and which needle or other
venous access device should be used.
- Demonstrate their understanding of the tasks involved in a procedure, showing both their
theorectical knowledge and practical skills.
- Build good technique.
- Build up individual learning records showing improvments over time.
- Test their skills running the training with no advice or assistance.
- View results, questions and course materials online via a secure website.
- Practise as many times as necessary, the only limit is time available.
Reporting
With the Virtual Veins reporting package each student generates their own learning record. The application stores the results from completed test
sessions enabling the trainee and the course tutor or supervisor to view progress and performance over time.
As users work, the system stores current results for viewing during that session within the Clinical Skills Trainer. When the session ends those
results are added to their training record in the database so that they can be accessed externally later. This ensures that the system is freed up
for practise rather than reviewing and past results are viewable either from the UK Haptics website where all users can login or through their own
organisation’s MLE where this has been setup to take input from the Clinical Skills Trainer.
Patients are often nervous faced with medical interventions or procedures of any kind, that nervousness can be eased dramatically by a clinician who
is confident and competent in their skills.
There is research to show that in the US where litigation in the medical arena is second to none, that litigation is far less likely where the clinician
is able to sense and empathise with the patient’s position Dr Stuart L Weinstein, University of Iowa (http://www.hospitalmanagement.net/features/feature743/ - 1st September 2006)
Benefits of Virtual Veins for training organisations
Cost savings vs training instances:
No costly disposables, time only limit on number of training instances.
Training records:
Students generate their own training records and can demonstrate and prove learning outcomes.
Allow your students to practise their skills in a virtual environment with no risk to patients.
Nurses, paramedics, The Blood Transfusion Service personnel, sports specialists and trainees from other
disciplines can gain confidence and competence in the Virtual Veins training simulator.
Where is Virtual Veins used?
Our products are in use in:
- Universities
- PCTs
- Hospitals
- Paramedic training units
- Ambulance Trusts
Would you like to know how to reduce your venepuncture costs and increase training instances?
With disposables costing £X, more and more organisations are having to cut costs and therefore the number
of training instances available for trainees.
What you see is what you touch!
We all know about wysiwyg - well with Virtual Veins you can go that extra step and wysiwyt, that is what you see is what you touch and you can ‘feel’
what you see!
Modules
Virtual Veins is designed as an extensible collection of modules. Currently available we have
Adult and Geriatric modules offering a range of clinical scenarios and including an Afro Caribbean
model where the veins can be much more difficult to see.