Exploring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Through Edstutia's ICXR Program
The XR Training Module was designed to address the issue of diagnostic overshadowing within healthcare, especially for patients with learning disabilities and mental health conditions. The project used immersive VR and AR experiences to train healthcare professionals (nurses, doctors, paramedics) to overcome diagnostic biases and improve patient care through empathy and better diagnostic practices.
Project Overview
Project Duration: 4 Weeks
Background: In healthcare training, diagnostic overshadowing is a critical issue, where healthcare professionals often attribute physical symptoms to a patient’s mental health or learning disability, leading to misdiagnosis. Traditional training methods fail to adequately address this bias, resulting in unequal treatment of diverse patient populations.
Problem: Healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses, and paramedics, often struggle with recognising diagnostic biases during patient assessments. Current training methods do not provide an immersive or experiential learning environment to address these biases meaningfully.
Affected Users:
- Healthcare professionals (nurses, doctors, paramedics)
- Nursing students and other healthcare trainees
- Patients with mental health conditions and learning disabilities
Impact: Diagnostic overshadowing leads to misdiagnoses, reduced quality of care, and increased health risks for vulnerable patients. Healthcare professionals miss opportunities to build empathy and address unconscious biases, resulting in a lack of equitable care.
Objective: To create an immersive VR training module that addresses diagnostic overshadowing by training healthcare professionals to recognise and mitigate diagnostic bias, integrate DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) principles, and foster empathy for patients with mental health and learning disabilities.
Project Showcase Video
My Role
As the Lead Designer, I was responsible for:
Storyboarding: Developed the visual and interactive flow of the experience.
Graphic Design: Created all the graphics and assets that were integrated into the VR environment.
Resource Sourcing: Researched and gathered all necessary materials to support the content, ensuring relevance to healthcare training.
UX Design: Thoughtfully crafted the user experience to make the VR interactions intuitive and engaging.
Research and Content Creation: Developed the module after extensive research into diagnostic overshadowing and DEI. The project was informed by tools such as the Community Tree Diagram< and strategic frameworks to align immersive learning with healthcare training goals.
Collaboration: I worked closely with:
Healthcare Professionals at my university to ensure the project aligned with training goals and medical accuracy.
Team Members at Edstutia who contributed to the ideation and design process. Together, we worked collaboratively to bring the project to life.
Presentations and Conferences
This project led to my presentation at the ATD TechKnowledge 2023 conference (in VR), where I discussed how VR can be used to create safe learning environments for healthcare professionals to practice decision-making without real-world consequences.
Project Goals
Reduce Diagnostic Overshadowing:
Train healthcare professionals to avoid bias when diagnosing patients with mental health conditions or learning disabilities
Enhance Empathy and DEI Awareness:
Create an immersive experience that fosters empathy by putting healthcare professionals in the shoes of diverse patients with different needs
Leadership in DEI and Healthcare Training:
Successfully integrated DEI principles into healthcare training, developing a replicable model for use in healthcare training environments.
Skills Developed
Immersive Learning Design:
Led the design and development of immersive training modules using the Edstutia VR Campus for interactive simulations. Used Procreate for sketching and storyboarding the experience and Photoshop and Illustrator to create assets.
Research Integration:
Applied research findings from key healthcare studies on diagnostic overshadowing to create meaningful, real-world scenarios for the training module.
Interactive and Immersive Learning:
Utilise board games, matching cards, and multimedia elements to engage healthcare workers in DEI-focused training
