Immersive Virtual Reality in Nursing Education. What About 360° Videos?

Nursing simulation is a teaching method that supports and integrates student learning, along with clinical training and formal teaching without overlapping or replacing them. Virtual reality (VR) is one of the most recent technologies applied to nursing simulation. The added value of VR consists precisely in the immersion and in the sense of presence (the feeling of being there) that it can generate, allowing people to learn from the experience they are living as if it were happening in real life. The 360 degrees video is a type of VR used in many sectors and increasingly in the healthcare one. The peculiarity of this experience is that the environments are not virtually reconstructed by a computer but they are real images and sounds previously recorded by a video camera. Therefore, the 360 degrees video has great potential especially in nursing training and simulation. The aim of this study was to conduct a scoping review on the 360 degrees video applied to nursing education and how this experience was evaluated. A comprehensive electronic search of five electronic databases (PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, CINAHL, and Scopus) was conducted from their inception to December 2021. Five studies met the inclusion criteria and were considered in this review. These studies encourage the use of this VR technology, but further research is necessary to explore the advantages of the 360 degrees video as learning method in nursing education and to better understand how to evaluate this immersive experience in order to guarantee the effectiveness in terms of learning outcomes.