Enhancing Trauma Injury Management Skills for Medical Professionals through Virtual Reality Training

The Air Force must be able to deliver high-fidelity, immersive, and standardized content across a geographically distributed force efficiently, effectively, and with scalability. Advanced Resuscitation and Surgical Teams are often composed of individuals from different bases who work together for the first time in pre-deployment spin-up training, which is heavily focused on non-medical administrative and tactical requirements. Teams must be trained incorporating the latest in the Joint Trauma System’s Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs), the American College of Surgeons Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) course, and the Joint Trauma System’s Emergency War Surgery Course. It will be imperative that teams have trained together in garrison to ensure effective and efficient team dynamics. The trainee’s current alternative is expensive and logistically challenging. Surgical team members are often sent TDY for weeks to civilian hospitals to gain exposure. While this may benefit individual skills and experience (at a significant cost in time and money), it fails to address team training requirements to ensure successful operations. Additionally, the number of surgical teams is increasing to meet the projected need in near-peer conflict, which will further compromise current readiness training solutions incapable of scale. High-fidelity virtual simulation design can fill the training gap and meet the readiness requirements for combat trauma and advanced resuscitation and surgical teams. Virtual simulation is more immersive, flexible, and affordable than traditional simulation. It allows trainees to develop complex decision-making through highly efficient and effective repetition while developing internal team dynamics and refining tactics, techniques, and procedures. We propose to adapt SimX’s commercial Virtual Reality Medical Simulation System (VRMSS) to answer this call and enable military forces to maintain operational readiness. SimX has identified proposed adaptations, including 1) the development of Hospital-Based Trauma Assessment and Management VR training scenarios, 2) the expansion of virtual tool abilities to include hospital-based trauma medicine-specific SKOs, and 3) the development of virtual environments to support the Hospital-based trauma assessment and management curriculum.