The development of an anesthesia crisis scenario builder for virtual reality training

Abstract

Anesthesiologists are trained in the field of anesthesia and preoperative medicine; they are required to develop anesthetic plans and monitor patients vitals. Currently, anesthesia trainees are taught using traditional educational approaches (e.g., by attending lectures, reading textbooks/journals, etc.). Although knowledge is best retained by actively doing rather than passively learning, there limited active methods that are easily accessible to anesthesia trainees. Here I present a scenario builder that allows for the simple development of anesthesia-based virtual simulations that can be tailored to specific (common and uncommon) anesthesia crisis scenarios providing a potential tool for interactive skills development. A study was conducted that examined the overall usability of the scenario builder. The results indicate that the scenario builder can be used to develop anesthesia-based scenarios without merely having an extensive technology-based background.