North West Hospital and Health Service (NWHHS) covers roughly 300,000 square kilometres of north-west Queensland with a single birthing facility, in Mount Isa, which handles up to 500 births a year. Women in remote communities are asked to relocate to Mount Isa from their thirty-sixth week of pregnancy, but premature labour, wet-season weather and family circumstances mean births and neonatal resuscitations still happen in clinics with no midwife on staff. Every remote-area nurse must hold current imminent-birth and neonatal resuscitation competency, and chronic short-staffing plus the wet season repeatedly blocked them from travelling to Mount Isa for face-to-face training.
NWHHS appointed a midwifery educator to develop and run that mandatory maternity training in virtual reality instead. Twenty VR headsets and controllers are being distributed between Mount Isa, Cloncurry, Normanton, Karumba, Mornington Island and Doomadgee, letting nurses join lessons run by educators in Mount Isa from their own community. Sessions are 10 to 15 minutes long, replacing trips that took critical staff away from vulnerable communities for weeks at a time. Inside the simulation nurses handle clinical equipment directly - picking up a stethoscope to listen to heart and lung sounds, dressing a patient, placing ECG dots.
The training was built with Bundle of Rays, the immersive healthcare education company founded by registered nurse Brad Chesham, with CQUniversity and the University of the Sunshine Coast as research partners. The initiative runs from July 2023 to June 2025 and is being evaluated as a formal research study using a Kirkpatrick framework, under ethics approval, measuring nurses' perceived preparedness for unexpected or unplanned maternity care after VR-delivered education.
NWHHS also hopes the technology helps it attract and retain staff in a region where recruitment is acutely difficult: it took the service months to recruit a GP to Julia Creek despite offering a $500,000-plus annual package and a rent-free house.
