VR Military Women's Health Care Services Simulation Training for Deployed Servicemembers

Military service poses unique challenges for women’s health and requires special consideration for military healthcare providers. There are currently over 220,000 women serving in the US military (17.2% of total service members) with 1.8 million female veterans. As the number of women in the military continues to increase, it will become even more important to ensure that military providers are specifically trained to provide comprehensive care for female service members and to anticipate potential medical conditions and psychosocial challenges associated with their service. As the number of ADW in the Air Force continues to increase, the USAF has a mission need to provide high-quality comprehensive healthcare to this population of warfighters in the deployed setting. Under the USAF’s Agile Combat Employment doctrine, the Air Force has a mission need to train elite warfighters who can address this gap and meet the mission need. Female service members face unique musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, reproductive, genitourinary, and psychological challenges, the complexity of which is difficult to represent with current simulation training options. This type of training, though absolutely necessary, is difficult to obtain pre-deployment due to the logistical complexity of high-fidelity training. Virtual reality simulations can provide these training modalities to give low-frequency but high-consequence training exercises in a deployed low-resource setting. Dedicated VR simulation to develop and sustain women’s health expertise would allow for routine proficiency training across the full spectrum of clinical scenarios driving high complexity decision-making in low occurrence, high consequence events. SimX has identified proposed adaptations, including 1) the development and implementation of five patient encounters for Women’s Health VR training scenarios, 2) the expansion of virtual patient models to include more realistic female and pregnant VR models, and 3) the development and implementation of multiple deployed environments to support Women’s Health curriculum.