An instructor guiding a student through resuscitation practice on a training manikin

Institut Narcís Xifra

First Aid in VR: practice emergencies before they happen

National project · Healthcare emergency training

3: ages
Real: protocols
Live: teamwork

The context

A nationwide effort to modernise how emergencies are taught

Coordinated by the Institut Narcís Xifra, this national project set out to rethink how healthcare emergencies are taught in vocational training across Spain. The goal was simple to state and hard to deliver: give students realistic, repeatable practice in handling medical emergencies, long before they ever face one with a real patient.

MetaMedicsVR joined as the technical partner, building the immersive simulations that sit at the heart of the programme. The partner institutions worked side by side to design, test and roll out the training to students in the field.

Nursing students practising patient care together in a simulation classroom

The challenge

You can't rehearse a real emergency

Traditional training does a good job of teaching the theory. What it cannot easily reproduce is the urgency, the unpredictability and the emotional pressure of a real emergency — the moments when a patient is deteriorating and decisions have to be made in seconds.

Mannequins and classroom drills help, but they are scarce, costly to run at scale and rarely recreate the chaos of a critical situation. Students often reach their first real emergency having practised the steps, but never the feeling of being there. The project set out to close that gap:

Make realistic emergency practice available to many students, not just a few at a time
Let learners repeat a scenario as many times as they need, without consequences
Train the teamwork and communication that real emergencies demand

What we built

A library of emergency scenarios in virtual reality

MetaMedicsVR developed a complete set of clinical simulations that students step into using a virtual reality headset — the visor that places them inside a fully recreated emergency, where they can look around, move and act as if they were really there. The scenarios cover the full spectrum of patients an emergency professional may meet:

Adult emergencies
Paediatric cases (children)
Neonatal cases (newborn babies)

Every scenario was built around real healthcare protocols — the same step-by-step procedures clinicians follow on the job — so what students practise inside the headset matches what they will be expected to do in reality. These include cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR, the chest compressions and rescue breaths used to restart a stopped heart), airway obstruction management (helping someone who is choking) and critical incident response.

A person wearing a virtual reality headset during an immersive training session

How it works

Train as a team, then review what happened

Real emergencies are rarely handled alone, so the simulations are collaborative. Several students can enter the same scenario at once and talk to each other through live voice channels — speaking in real time as they would in a real resuscitation, dividing roles and coordinating the response together.

Learning does not stop when the headset comes off. After each session the platform generates automated performance reports, and students can replay a recording of their own actions to see exactly what they did, where they hesitated and what to improve next time. This loop of practice, feedback and review is what turns a single run-through into lasting skill.

You practise the same emergency until the response becomes second nature — without ever putting a real patient at risk.

Hands demonstrating chest compressions on a resuscitation training manikin

Why it matters

Repetition without risk, where it counts most

The project brought immersive emergency practice to students across the partner institutions, training them in skills such as resuscitation, airway management and critical response. Because the scenarios can be repeated on demand, every learner gets the kind of hands-on time that scarce mannequins and limited clinical placements rarely allow.

The wider evidence backs the approach. A systematic review and meta-analysis of health-professions education found that virtual reality improves how well learners acquire clinical knowledge and skills compared with traditional teaching. For emergency care — where the right action in the first seconds can change an outcome — that ability to practise until the response is automatic is exactly what matters.

If you recognise your own situation here, let's talk about how it could work for you.

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