Citation

Rahouti A, Lovreglio R, Datoussaïd S, Descamps T. Fire Technol. 2021; 57(6): 3041-3078.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s10694-021-01098-x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In a healthcare context, the success of a fire safety procedure in a real-life emergency mainly depends on staff decisions and actions. One of the factors influencing staff decision-making is their training. In most healthcare facilities, safety educators use slide-based lectures as a training tool. Virtual Reality (VR) is gaining fire safety community attention for being an interesting training tool. However, few studies have assessed the effectiveness of VR-based fire safety training simulators compared with a slide-based lecture. The present research proposes a novel non-immersive VR-based training for healthcare fire safety education. This paper describes the prototyping steps required to develop a non-immersive VR serious game (SG) to train the staff of Vincent Van Gogh (VVG) hospital in Belgium. The paper finally validates the VR SG comparing its effectiveness against slide-based lecture training. 78 staff from VVG hospital in Belgium participated in this study. They were divided into two groups: Group A was trained using a slide-based lecture, and Group B was trained using the VR SG. The results indicated that the VR SG was more effective than the slide-based lecture in terms of knowledge acquisition and retention and in terms of self-efficacy increment in short and long terms than the slide-based lecture.

Language: en

Keywords

Fire safety; Hospital; Intrinsic motivation; Knowledge; Self-efficacy; Virtual reality