During a checkup with her obstetrician, Marilyn Hayes tells him about overwhelming exhaustion and possible symptoms of postpartum depression, such as feeling unsafe. Hayes, a Black woman, grows increasingly frustrated as her white, male physician, Dr. Richard Flynn, dismisses her symptoms and ignores her wishes when she refuses medication.
Hayes becomes visibly uncomfortable when Flynn touches her without permission and makes comments steeped in Black stereotypes, such as assuming that she's unmarried and the baby's father is uninvolved with her and their infant. While Hayes and Flynn are fictional characters depicted in a virtual reality video, Hayes' experiences are similar to those of many Black women and women of color when they interact with clinicians and their staff members, studies have found. Hayes' checkup with Flynn is the first in a series of three virtual reality training modules being developed to heighten physicians' awareness of implicit bias in patient care and cultural competency skills.
"Ultimately, this virtual reality training system could become a viable tool for practicing communication with diverse patients across different types of health care professions," said Charee Thompson, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies physician-patient communication and is one of the team members developing the virtual reality training series. "There's no reason why nurses couldn't also use this across different health c.