On Monday, June 6, Congressman Paul Tonko met with Maria College students, faculty and leadership where he learned more about the college’s “Reimagining Nursing: Virtual Reality Simulation Hub,” one of 15 Community Project Sites recently submitted by the Congressman to the House Committee on Appropriations for federal funding.
This project requests $770,088 in federal funding to support the purchase of virtual reality software, hardware, monitors and other equipment to be used for clinical hours in nursing education. Due to a shortage of available clinical placements, there is currently a bottleneck of nursing students trying to enter the field, thus contributing to a severe nursing shortage in New York State. The project addresses this need by augmenting hospital-based experiential learning with high-fidelity virtual reality technologies to afford students more practice in controlled nursing simulation scenarios and expand scenarios beyond what they are likely to encounter in a two-year nursing program clinical rotation. In addition, this program will enable students to leverage more experience from clinical hours, gain further opportunities to practice and learn from mistakes, and develop competency confidence. As the largest provider of nursing graduates in the Capital Region, Maria College anticipates it will be able to significantly increase the number of students who can become Registered Nurses here in our community, thus helping to provide the health care that New York State children and families need.
Maria also welcomed Assemblymember Patricia Fahy as well as leadership from Albany Medical Center and St. Peter’s Health Partners. The group visited the current simulation labs and were then shown the virtual reality demonstration. The Congressman will use this information to further advocate for the project. Projects are due to be announced no later than October 2023.
Learn more about Maria’s “Reimagining Nursing: Virtual Reality Simulation Hub.”