Acquiring the necessary skills to become a competent physician requires learning the professional standards in a real-life context.  Often times the ability to assess and treat disease in this setting is not always possible as scenarios can be difficult to simulate due to cost, safety, or setting.  To this end Virtual Reality (VR) has tremendous educational potential and may play a role in the future education of healthcare professionals at all levels of training.  VR can help augment what occurs in the classroom and simulation center to establish greater depth and understanding.  This can help broaden clinical exposure, ensure uniformity in training, enhance skill acquisition, and develop greater empathy in a disease process.  VR also has the ability to augment other learning tools such as books, lectures, and simulation.

In this study, third year medical students participated in a 15-minute virtual reality scenario  experiencing an epileptic seizure from a patient perspective.   This was paired with an educational video introducing the clinical assessment and treatment of epilepsy.  Each student experienced both the VR experience and the instructional video.  This was followed by a debriefing session. 

Learners reported a significant increase in competency of treating epilepsy. There was also a reported increase in empathy and developing methods to communicate with patients with seizures.  Learners came from a diverse range of experience in using VR devices and very few had used VR for educational experiences.

VR is an emerging technological advancement that has the potential to augment other teaching methodologies to provide a greater emphasis on empathy and the social implications of neurological diseases.  It is relatively easy to implement and well received by the learner.  Further validation to the impact as well as including additional health care professionals will be pursued.