Development of Communication Skills Through Virtual Reality on Nursing School Students: Clinical Trial

Abstract

Multiple studies demonstrate benefits of virtual simulations as recreation of reality in the development of instrumental skills, but few randomized studies prove its efficacy in the development of communication and interpersonal relationships skills. The objective was to develop a virtual reality simulator to improve communication skills and compare its results with a traditional workshop based on cases and theoretical content explained through video. This is a randomized and controlled clinical trial, with a pretest and a posttest. Participants were first-year students from the Faculty of Nursing, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain (n = 100). The sample was divided into two groups: the intervention group (n = 50) was provided a virtual reality simulation teaching process as a novel resource, whereas the control group was provided with a case-based traditional workshop. Because data followed a normal distribution, it was analyzed with Student t test for independent samples, the group sample comparison, and analysis of variance, to find differences among age subgroups. Significant changes were observed at the time of evaluating the skills for the intervention group (P < .01) in comparison with the control group. Both interventions are effective after the first evaluation; however, virtual reality–based intervention stands above the usual method and showed better results in older students.