ABSN student Marvin Garagan participates in VR simulation in the Metro Annex. Photo by Angela Foster.
When students in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree program put on virtual reality headsets this summer, they are stepping into a new kind of clinical learning.
Thanks to a High Impact Practices Grant from the UTC Walker Center for Teaching and Learning, ABSN students are piloting virtual reality simulation in two College of Nursing clinical courses focused on introducing immersive scenarios in maternal-newborn and pediatric care.
The pilot is the first time the college has used VR simulation in this way. Faculty say it is aimed at a simple challenge: giving students more consistent practice in a program that moves fast and depends on limited clinical placements.
“One of the biggest factors with us, especially in the accelerated program, is that we’re limited on time,” said Assistant Professor of Practice Savannah Kelley. “The students have a year to complete all of their clinicals and experiences before they’re licensed. And we really want our students to be able to feel confident going into the clinical setting and have as many hands-on experiences as they can.”
For Kelley and Lecturer Katie Parker, the appeal of VR was not that it could replace hospital experiences. It was that it could help fill in the gaps that naturally come with them.
As examples, they explained that students may arrive at a clinical site on a slow day and a particular patient situation may not present itself. Or one student may get a chance to see or do something that another student in the same group never encounters.
“Yesterday, two students were able to see a C-section,” Kelley said. “Two students were able to give a specific medication or practice a specific nursing skill like an IV placement, but not all the students can do that.
“With this VR sim, we can do that. They all have the same experience.”
Kelley and Parker selected the specific scenarios with intention. Rather than simply letting students browse through the platform’s large library, the faculty members chose cases they believed would be most useful, especially situations students may be less likely to encounter during a limited run of hospital clinicals.
“We can ensure everyone has seen a postpartum hemorrhage,” Parker said. “Everyone has seen an asthma exacerbation.”
That consistency matters even more in the accelerated program, where students complete the same clinical requirements as those in the traditional program, but in a much shorter time.
From left: Elise Hart, Assistant Professor of Practice Savannah Kelley, Yayla Blodgett-White and Lecturer Katie Parker.
The UTC ABSN program requires 59 credit hours over three semesters, with 21 credit hours dedicated specifically to hands-on clinical settings. Clinicals generally involve 12-hour shifts, multiple days a week, and immerse students in Chattanooga-area hospitals and clinics.
The program admits a new cohort each fall, spring and summer.
“We have the same clinical requirements as the traditional,” Parker said. “It’s not that we’re doing less clinical hours. We just do them in less time.”
The Walker Center grant funds $1,980 in UbiSim student licenses for about 20 second-semester accelerated nursing students enrolled in NURS 3155, Maternal-Newborn Clinical, and NURS 3165, Pediatric Clinical. The College of Nursing simulation lab is providing headsets at no additional cost to the grant.
UbiSim is an immersive VR training platform built specifically for nursing education.
The project includes small-group use, faculty-facilitated debriefing and a three-part structured reflection designed to track how students’ clinical reasoning develops across both courses.
Kelley said the VR format includes the same required elements as traditional simulation, including preparation, debriefing and reflection.
Parker said traditional simulation usually requires a faculty member to be present with a set group of students at a set time. VR opens the door for a more flexible model, especially once students become more comfortable with the technology.
“This can happen kind of asynchronously, which works well in the rapidity of this program,” she said. “This allows for a bit more flexibility within the somewhat inflexible schedule they have.”
Faculty members are still helping students with the technology as the pilot gets underway. The longer-term goal is to allow students to sign up for available times and complete assigned scenarios on a schedule that fits around the rest of their coursework.
Kelley said the pilot addresses a gap in maternal-newborn and pediatric training because placement availability in both specialties is among the most limited in the Chattanooga region. VR simulation, she said, gives every student standardized exposure to critical scenarios regardless of patient census or site access.
Parker said the platform helps reinforce the order in which students should assess and respond to patients.
“You can’t give a medicine until you scan their armband and confirm the patient and then scan the medication and all the things,” she said.
That kind of repetition, she explained, helps students build habits early.
“They don’t have muscle memory to do all these things by habit,” Parker said. “Every time they recreate that pathway of doing the things in the proper order, doing a proper procedure, that helps ingrain that in their brain.
Parker said she was really impressed with how realistic the simulation felt when she tried the VR headset.
“The IV medication, when it’s running, you can actually see it dripping,” she said. “You can see the pump running. You can feel their pulses. You can hear their heartbeat.”
Kelley pointed to a detail that stood out to her.
“You can shine a pen light into the patient’s eye and it responds like we do in a real assessment,” she said.
Both said the goal is not to impress students with the technology. It is to give them more chances to practice clinical judgment before they enter the workforce.
“Ultimately these students are going to be nurses,” Kelley said, “and this is such a practice-based profession.”
She said more hands-on practice can help students develop clinical judgment and feel more confident before they graduate.
Dr. Kristen Singletary, clinical associate professor and ABSN program director, said she saw the value right away when Kelley and Parker brought the idea forward.
“I was so excited,” Singletary said. “I love the opportunity for them to get to try new things and explore ways to bring clinical judgment to our students.”
She said the timing also made sense because the College of Nursing’s new Dorothy and Jim Kennedy Health Sciences Building, scheduled for completion in 2027, will include a room designated for VR simulation.
“What better time to start than now to figure out how to best use that room,” Singletary said.
She also tied the pilot to a broader reality facing nursing programs: growth in enrollment does not automatically translate into increased clinical site availability.
“We’re committed to the growth of the ABSN program, enrolling more students, turning out more nurses,” she said, “and as we do that, that comes with less clinical site availability. So we’re just trying to find ways to supplement clinical hours and to teach our students clinical judgment in a safe environment.”
Singletary said the pilot could help the college make smarter decisions before that dedicated VR space opens in the new building.
“There’s no way to put a value on that,” she said.
“I think the sky’s the limit,” Kelley added. “We could make it grow and we could use it in all of our programs.”
A UbiSim virtual reality nursing scenario shows a patient in a hospital bed as two virtual clinicians provide care in a simulated exam room.
Kelley and Parker said they began thinking through the idea as they looked for sustainable ways to strengthen student learning within the limits of time, scheduling and clinical access. After attending presentations by previous Walker Center grant recipients, they believed their proposal fit the kind of innovative teaching project the center wanted to support.
“We wouldn’t have been able to do this without it,” Singletary said of the grant.
If the summer pilot produces strong results, Kelley said UbiSim licensing could eventually be built into future ABSN program fees, making the grant a one-time University investment rather than an ongoing funding need.
Faculty members plan to collect and analyze outcome data through UbiSim’s AI Narrative Analysis, present findings at the Walker Center grant symposium this fall and pursue opportunities to share the work at a national nursing simulation conference and in a peer-reviewed journal.
Kelley said students complete written reflections after orientation and early sessions, and many have already expressed excitement about the VR experience.
“Not everybody who tried it had put on a VR headset,” Kelley said. “That’s probably the biggest barrier in starting something like this: how comfortable you feel with the technology. They all caught on pretty well.”
For Singletary, that kind of structured exposure is another way to provide students with a safer place to learn.
“It allows them to actually think through ‘What do I need to assess, what do I need to know about my patient, what actions do I need to take,’” she said.
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