The area of medicine is about to incur virtual reality technology, which is proving to be the next solution for the variety of medical training, therapy, rehabilitation, and individualized care. Along with the manifold advantages VR may bring, it also raises serious issues like equal access, which is a problem of how to ensure safe use by various groups and the possibility of social workers’ increasing role in this new area.
What are the benefits and limits of the technology?
VR in healthcare has been highly valued and expected to increase due to its capacity to recreate 3D medical training environments for life-like clinical training. Orthopedic surgery residents who undergo training using a VR simulator yield high scores in terms of their technical skill improvement and advanced anatomical knowledge when compared to traditional training methods (Kuhn et al., 2024). Virtual Reality provides for training, which includes conducting procedures and experiencing abstract cases that are rare in actual operation. As one more VR feature, patients treated can be transported into relaxing virtual world places where the symptoms might be decreased. This can help ease stress and pain perceptibility.
It becomes clear that VR is also included in therapy and rehabilitation. It does this by creating novel ways of dealing with phobias, PTSD, and anxiety disorders through real-time exposure therapy but in virtual rooms. So, if physical rehabilitation after a stroke or an injury involves VR games and exercises, the person is more likely to feel motivated. This will result in faster neural plasticity and regaining motor skills.
Besides its potential, VR technology is restricted by several key issues. The physical manifestations of motion sickness in relation to disparities between the real world and the virtual world will be, as a rule, represented by nausea, headaches, and loss of spatial orientation (Giaretta, 2022). The affordability of the hardware in VR and how it would work in individual and outpatient care may be hindered by both the cost and access to the technology. Last but most important are privacy, data security, and ethical concerns, which must further be researched and guidelines laid down.
Are there any special implications for communities of color or special populations?
Adopting VR in healthcare requires checking applicability across all communities and groups of people; not only is it important, but it is also crucial. Periprint, sound, or vision disabilities might be the reason to prevent the entire enjoyment of VR simulations. According to the study done by Liu et al. (2022), the current VR systems have gaps in cultural competency and representation, a possible limitation for varied races in building close contact and effectivity. Language barriers, lack of technology mastery, and diverse views toward new technologies programmatically require diligent adjustments in services for immigrants and elderly individuals.
How does it contribute to individualized or patient-focused medicine from a social work perspective?
From a social work perspective, VR is an ideal tool for patient-centered, individualized care based on the biopsychosocial model, which explains that every person has distinct social, physical, emotional, and academic needs. The virtue of the VR environment is that it can be tailored specifically to one’s circumstances and connected to the sense of their medical taking, skill building, and therapeutic interventions Hutchison (2016). Filter out the one-size-fits-all strategies. Self-efficiency growth and achievement are the result rather than the cause of the focus on an individual’s involvement.
Is it used, or could it be used in your field placement, and how?
VR initiatives could be of relevance to social workers in the aftermath of such events when they become involved in community work as well as at practice sites. For the healthcare sector, social workers may be involved in creating VR assessments, managing VR groups that educate patients or patients’ relatives, or designing VR simulations based on patient-steered personal factors and culture-based content. Social workers with a background of cultural competence, empathetic counseling skills, and strengths-based viewpoints would be supportive of the practice of tailoring to individual needs or optimizing the VR experiences.
Imagine and describe the expanding role(s) of the social worker in implementing this initiative.
To develop a VR model, Social workers could encourage policy change to reduce the inequalities in the availability of VR technologies across the most marginalized communities and diverse care settings. They could create programs that will create technology literacy where various vital perspectives of stakeholders supplement the development of virtual reality content that will be inclusive and multi-lingual Giaretta (2022). Social workers may also correct the public’s incorrect perspectives on VR safety, relevance, and the disability myth.
However, the use of digital Reality in healthcare is a new era of metaphors that has its disadvantages and needs to be handled sensitively to ensure that no side of disease is left out and that more implications are produced. As social workers, we are called upon to be extempore transmitters of VR platforms’ vicariousness and exploit them within a conscious framework so that biases are condemned, and fairness and equity are ensured for everyone.
References
Giaretta, A. (2022). Security and Privacy in Virtual Reality — A Literature Survey. ArXiv (Cornell University). https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2205.00208
Hutchison, E. D. (2016). Essentials of Human Behavior: Integrating Person, Environment, and the Life Course. In Google Books. SAGE Publications. Retrieved from https://books.google.co.ke/books/about/Essentials_of_Human_Behavior.html?id=6jYbDQAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y
Kuhn, A. W., Yu, J. K., Gerull, K. M., Silverman, R. M., & Aleem, A. W. (2024). Virtual Reality and Surgical Simulation Training for Orthopaedic Surgery Residents. JB & JS Open Access, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.2106/jbjs.oa.23.00142
Lyu, H., Vachha, C., Chen, Q., Odysseus Pyrinis, Liou, A., Balasaravanan Thoravi Kumaravel, & Hartmann, B. (2022). WebTransceiVR. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519816
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