Virtual Reality in The Help of Hospitals in Yemen

One Shot Immersive and Folprof won the top prize in the “Most Effective Use of Augmented and Virtual Reality” category at the 2021 Drum Awards for Digital Industries.

One Shot Immersive launched its first virtual reality project in Yemen, where there are only 4 surgeons per 1 million people, compared to 345 surgeons per million in the UK. This means that if someone is injured in Yemen, they will probably end up in a hospital that has no surgeon at all.

Their goal is to help healthcare workers save lives by providing as much knowledge as possible.

“Never underestimate the number of lives a line of code can save.” James Gough, founder of One Shot Immersive

The project uses virtual reality technologies to create real-world simulations of disaster medicine and traumatic emergencies. Products can train medical and nonmedical personnel to make vital decisions in critical situations.

The project helps users learn how to make decisions that impact patient outcomes and measure the effectiveness of their choices to verify the skills they have learned.

The experience places the user in a situation of massive losses and other traumatic emergencies. The user is the triage officer who decides which emergency or patient is a priority.

They are asked to prioritize using the International Red Cross guidelines for Category 1-4 triage, so some will not survive. This is extremely difficult and perhaps one of the most difficult decisions for a health professional to make. Who lives and who dies?

They are asked to prioritize using the International Red Cross guidelines for Category 1-4 triage, so some will not survive. This is extremely difficult and perhaps one of the most difficult decisions for a health professional to make. Who lives and who dies?

In January 2020, 60 Yemeni health professionals were trained using One Shot VR software. A world first. In real terms, this means that six Yemeni health workers are now not only equipped to return to the hospital and perform triage when the worst happens, but also empowered to teach their colleagues the ICRC triage methodology. Through virtual reality, they experienced real-world scenarios, made critical decisions, and learned lessons in a safe environment.

Since then, showing that this type of technology can be used in the most dangerous areas of the world has attracted the interest of other major organizations struggling to make full use of what is now readily available technology.

In collaboration with the World Health Organization, the project is now expanding to other parts of the world.