A project to provide clinical skills training in virtual reality for healthcare professionals in Uganda is being developed by a Wales-based partnership.
Cardiff company Goggleminds and the University of South Wales (USW) are working together on the Accelerated Knowledge Transfer Partnership funded by Innovate UK.
Goggleminds has developed the ‘Mediverse’ – virtual reality technology for training healthcare professionals and students. The concept mirrors actual situations that healthcare professionals are likely to be facing when doing their training, without the need to have real people on which to test their skills.
The company has already worked closely with USW on developing the system. The University’s Centre of Excellence in Mobile and Emerging Technologies (CEMET) supported Goggleminds to build a VR system which focuses specifically on treating children.
Goggleminds founder Azize Naji explained the aim of the Uganda collaboration.
“Our plan is to establish one of the first VR training centres in sub-Saharan Africa, with the aim of supporting local healthcare professionals and students to address the limited access to quality healthcare in the region,” he said.
“In parts of the country, there's very limited access to good quality healthcare – some have no access to medical schools and the World Health Organisations official data confirms that, of 47 African countries surveyed, it was determined that the region has a ratio of 1.55 health workers per 1,000 people. The rate in some countries is a lot lower and for specific specialities like doctors, it’s critically low”.
“So what we really want to do is to help some of the local healthcare systems to increase capacity, and a great way of doing this is actually by sharing knowledge and skills from the UK because we have a wealth of that.”
Andrew Ware, Professor of Computing at USW and Director of Research for the Wales Institute of Digital of Information (WIDI) said:
“USW has a long track record of developing innovative and engaging ways of delivering complex training and has been working with the international partner for a number of years on deploying new and impactful technologies in the Ugandan health sector.”
