ANXIETY-Reduce-VR for Nursing Students

Abstract

Anxiety, characterized by feelings of worry and pervasive thoughts, manifests through physiological responses such as accelerated heart rate, tremors, vertigo, and hypertension. Both undergraduate nursing students and Internationally Educated Nurses (IENs) report significant levels of anxiety during clinical rotations, attributing it to the dread of committing errors, intimidation by faculty members, lack of practical experience, and the incapacity to predict unfamiliar clinical occurrences. IENs face additional anxiety-inducing factors, including linguistic barriers due to English proficiency, acclimatization to new clinical settings that require cultural competence, exposure to workplace discrimination, ambiguity in professional roles, and the adaptation to unfamiliar medical equipment and protocols. The integration of Augmented Reality (AR) experiences presents a potential educational tool for imparting anxiety management techniques and promoting collaborative teamwork skills. This initiative proposes the adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) technology to facilitate the acquisition of coping mechanisms for anxiety, enabling nursing students to undergo training in managing stress-inducing scenarios either before or subsequent to participation in simulated clinical cases.