VR offers benefits for learners and educators, delivering cost-effective, repeatable, standardised clinical training on demand. A large body of evidence supports VR simulation in all industries, including healthcare. Though VR is not a panacea, it is a powerful educational tool for defined learning objectives and implementation is growing worldwide. The future of VR lies in its ongoing integration into curricula and with technological developments that allow shared simulated clinical experiences. This will facilitate quality interprofessional education at scale, independent of geography, and transform how we deliver education to the clinicians of the future.

The pace of change in medical practice is relentless. The complex needs of an ageing population, the range of treatment options available, the interprofessional nature of care and the complexity of healthcare systems themselves are vastly different today than they were 20 years ago.

As such, how we prepare future clinicians for practice has had to adapt. It is no longer a question of whether an individual can retain or access facts, but how they use them, evaluate them and apply them to patient care.

There is therefore a move to replace rote learning with more clinically relevant and practical teaching. Problem-based learning, communication skills training and simulation-based learning have all entered curricula. With the increasing drive to provide clinical learning experiences, and the inherent difficulties in doing so, simulation in particular has gained momentum as a method of delivering experiential learning.

Simulation is an educational technique that involves creating situations that replicate real life, letting a learner act as they would do in real life, then providing feedback and debrief on performance. Simulation is effective in many domains and has been found to be ‘superior to traditional clinical education, producing powerful educational interventions that yield immediate and lasting results.

However, while simulation is becoming central to healthcare education, it requires significantly more resources than

traditional education. At a time when healthcare systems and educational institutions globally are struggling with growing demands and limited budgets, additional resources are hard to come by.

Fortunately, there has been a recent dramatic expansion in the ways in which we can deliver medical education. This has not only been through the internet and mobile devices, but through immersive technologies. These technologies – including augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) – can transform how we deliver educational experiences.

VR in particular has been adopted across medical and nursing fields. VR involves the user putting on a VR headset to become completely immersed in an interactive virtual environment. When used with appropriate educational software, this allows the user to learn from experience in the virtual world.

VR is already transforming medical education. It is helping to free learning from the classroom, allowing learners to apply their knowledge to practice and learn from mistakes. It focuses on improving competencies and places the emphasis on autonomous, blended learning, which is expected from the learners of today.

As VR continues to be implemented and integrated within curricula, its use will become mainstream. The ability for multiple learners to take part in truly interprofessional, completely life-like simulation which is not bound by geography, is set to change how we conduct medical and interprofessional education beyond recognition.