Research

Published 24 August 2009

The University of Brighton is co-investigating the development of a virtual hospital to help patients with learning disabilities understand treatments and to feel more at ease.

Professor Valerie Hall of the School of Nursing and Midwifery is one of four experts studying the initiative which also aims to provide medical staff with a toolkit to better assess a patient’s capacity to give consent to treatment.

A 3D simulation of the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton is being developed and 20 volunteers from the Grace Eyre Foundation, a Brighton charity supporting people with learning difficulties, will take part in testing it in October.

The hospital is being built in Second Life, an online world in which people participate in the form of virtual representatives or avatars. Each 'patient' is directed to a waiting room before being taken by a nurse to a bed where they will lie down and have their blood pressure taken. They will then be taken to the anaesthetic room and from there to the operating theatre.

The programme contains a storyboard scenario, pre-programmed to represent the patient's experience and ready to be triggered by the patient or their helper.

A real person sits close to the volunteer patients to answer any questions and a week later they will be asked how much they remembered and understood.

Under the Mental Capacity Act, patients have to give consent for treatment and hospitals have to be sure patients with disabilities have the capacity to do so.

The research will be carried out at the Grace Eyre Foundation's IT suite in Montefiore Road, Hove, Professor Hall is working with the foundation's Eva Jarvis, Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill, consultant psychologist with the Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, and Dave Taylor from Imperial College, London.

The independent study has been commissioned by the National Institute for Health Research unders its Invention for Innovation Programme and there are hopes the 'virtual hospital' could bring savings by enhancing decision-making, improving treatment compliance and potentially leading to early diagnosis with no increase in readmission rates.