Following its recent multi-million investment round, the UK’s leading VR training platform, MOONHUB, has expanded its virtual reality (VR) training suite offering into the health and social care sector with the launch of ELARA.
Starting with Dementia Care training, ELARA brings a new approach to traditional classroom and eLearning methods; empowering healthcare professionals to enhance patient care through a patented highly immersive, low-risk VR training.
“Dementia affects everyone differently and can be a very distressing experience” said Claire Surr, Professor of Dementia Studies and Director of the Centre for Dementia Research, Leeds Beckett University who co-curated Elara’s new training programme. “Staff must have an understanding of how people with dementia might see the world, and the impacts of what other people say and do, as well as the physical environment on the person’s wellbeing and behaviour. The VR training I have helped curate places staff in realistic care scenarios to help them develop the skills and knowledge to prevent or reduce distress. Research indicates experiential dementia training can help increase their empathy and understanding, potentially improving the quality of care staff deliver. We hope VR will offer an exciting avenue for providing experiential learning opportunities.”
MOONHUB’s patented VR technology creates a 360°, video-shot learning environment which replicates lifelike scenarios. The training curriculum highlights how dementia can affect a person’s behaviour and guides caregivers on how to identify triggers or reasons for distress, as well as offering techniques for enhancing communication to support patient needs. Post-training, participants are given a rich overview of their performances via a personal dashboard enabling organisations to make informed, data-driven decisions on caregivers’ potential and better streamline solutions. The outcome is a care workforce with honed technical skills, heightened cognitive awareness, and an understanding that dementia is only a diagnosis and not a definition of their patients.
Martin Green, Chief Executive, Care England comments: “The launch of MOONHUB’s virtual reality training is a very creative way to deliver training for care professionals. This new system has the potential to revolutionise the training experience and offers an interactive and comprehensive approach to training and development”
The content of MOONHUB’s ELARA dementia training aligns with learning outcomes from the Dementia Training Standards Framework, is approved and accredited by CPD standards, and is recognised by Care England – the largest and most diverse representative body for independent providers of adult social care in England.
“The pandemic has shone a spotlight on health and social care, highlighting its strength and resilience during the most troubling of times. We immediately recognised the importance of social care and the need for investment and development in the future. When we first started building the programme, we wanted to ensure we had the right resources and expertise to offer a state-of-the-art experience to those training in the healthcare sector” said Dami Hastrup, Founder and CEO of MOONHUB. “We believe dementia education and training for the health and social care professionals is vital and we’re incredibly excited to be the first to offer an immersive and accessible solution to upskill learners with the appropriate person-centred care through the power of VR”.
For MOONHUB, VR represents the only way forward for workplace upskilling and career development. Remotely deployable, and not requiring physical spaces to execute, learners can train anytime, anywhere. What’s more, VR accelerates learning. Compared to traditional learning methods, VR learners retain 75% more knowledge than eLearning (10%) and classroom (5%) based training. VR learners also report being 275% more confident in applying the skills learned in the field. In addition, VR training can save up to 64% at scale compared to traditional training approaches.
This month MOONHUB successfully raised £2.6m in seed funding with global Proptech venture capital firm Pi Labs. As part of the VC’s 2022 Growth Programme, MOONHUB will continue to scale up its operations and VR product innovation with the help of global tech experts, advisors and investors.
