St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton, part of St. Joseph's Health System, has adopted head-mounted virtual reality to train hospital staff, physicians and learners for Code White incidents (violence or aggression from patients or visitors) and other high-stress clinical events at its Centre for Education, Learning and Simulation (CELS).
The Department of Education and Learning and the Forensic Psychiatry Department piloted the programme, developing immersive VR Code White scenarios tailored to general and forensic psychiatry, plus general medicine, in collaboration with Ottawa-based technology company SimWave. Staff wear VR headsets and use controllers to move through a semi-gamified, narrator-guided replica of an inpatient unit at the hospital's West 5th Campus, practising verbal de-escalation and safety-management techniques. Some scenarios also place staff in a patient's perspective, including experiencing a seclusion room from the patient's point of view. The Ontario Hospital Association reported St. Joseph's as the first hospital in Canada to adopt VR for this purpose; the programme was described as a pilot, with official rollout still to come.
Separately, in September 2026 a $1.98-million grant from the Ontario Ministry of Health's Models of Care Innovation Fund is helping St. Joseph's Health System open five CELS sites across southern Ontario, including a comprehensive Hamilton centre with multiple simulation laboratories and a dedicated virtual reality training space, alongside curriculum updates and new clinical placement opportunities. That grant covers the wider education package rather than the Code White VR scenarios, which were developed earlier.
