North Carolina Central University's Department of Nursing in Durham, North Carolina puts its nursing students into head-mounted virtual reality to rehearse hospital shifts before they reach a real clinical placement. Students use vrClinicals for Nursing, which the university describes as "a virtual reality platform developed by Wolters Kluwer Health in collaboration with Laerdal Medical". Wearing headsets, they enter virtual hospital rooms and speak to AI-driven patients in their own voice rather than choosing from scripted replies.
WUNC reported in April 2025 that the university had begun the virtual-reality version of the programme as a pilot the previous summer, and that conversational AI had since been added. Tina Scott, DNP, director of experiential learning at the NCCU Department of Nursing, described the first senior cohort's session: students took care of four patients at once, decided which to see first, and developed a plan of care once the headsets were on. By the time of that report, all nursing students in clinical-focused courses had been through the programme, and Scott said the university hoped to expand it across the nursing school.
Scott told WUNC that the conversational AI component "actually stretched our students to think and really strengthen that critical thinking, because based on what they said to the patient, the patient responded with some real things that (weren't) scripted". Nursing student Haley Daniels described a virtual patient having an adverse reaction to an antibiotic that closely resembled one she could encounter in practice.
NCCU's nursing students also train at the university's Clinical Learning Resource Center, known as Eagle General Hospital, which the university says holds 14 high-fidelity simulators and partial task trainers and whose simulations run throughout the nursing curriculum. That physical manikin facility is a separate, pre-existing programme and is not part of this virtual-reality deployment. The reviewed sources report no measured learning outcomes for the VR programme.
