Mater Education: Speaking with Good Judgement

Mater Education, part of the Mater hospital group in Queensland, asked People Tech Revolution to help bring its "Speaking with Good Judgement" (SWGJ) culture program into virtual reality. SWGJ is Mater's internal program for building staff skills in feedback and speaking up respectfully, behaviours at the centre of psychologically safe healthcare workplaces.

Speaking with Good Judgement: Through the Looking Glass, the branched VR experience built for Mater Education.

The challenge

Participation and engagement in SWGJ's traditional, face-to-face delivery were waning. Mater wanted to know whether making the program more interactive, engaging and emotionally resonant, without losing its substance, could reverse that trend.

What was built

The result was "Speaking with Good Judgement: Through the Looking Glass", a branched VR experience built with Mater Foundation and Advance Queensland, and co-designed with Mater Education, SWGJ team leads and the Centre for Medical Simulation at Harvard. The build placed staff inside familiar Mater environments, recreated in 360-degree VR, such as hospital rooms and break areas. Guided by a narrator, participants observed realistic conversations between animated characters navigating difficult feedback situations. The scenarios were branched: learners made choices and saw the consequences of different communication styles play out in real time, rather than simply watching a fixed sequence.

The build also includes a Practice Mode: after working through a scenario, staff can record themselves responding, replay their own delivery, and rate their confidence before trying again. It is a feature of the shipped experience, built for private, repeatable rehearsal rather than assessment.

How it was delivered

Following the pilot, the VR experience was delivered face-to-face to more than 60 staff across Mater's Brisbane and regional campuses, and a workshop trained Mater's own SWGJ facilitators to run the technology, so the program could continue in-house rather than depend on PTR for every session. Mater's Executive Team also personally tested the experience. According to a Queensland XR Hub case study, the pilot ran on Pico Neo 3 headsets with approximately 100 participants across five Queensland locations.

The VR experience opens under the Mater Education brand before staff step into a recreated scenario.

Backed by Advance Queensland

Advance Queensland, the Queensland Government's innovation program, awarded People Tech Revolution $40,000 to help build this pilot, and Mater Education contributed a further $110,000 as part of its partnership with Advance Queensland's Corporate Innovation Network, as detailed in Advance Queensland's own story about the project. The pilot also features in an official Queensland Government video. A grant like this is funding support, not proof the training worked: it confirms the pilot was resourced and delivered, not the results reported below.

Results

Figures below are as reported by Mater Education following its program evaluation:

Facilitators also reported that staff felt safer and more confident, both during the VR sessions and afterwards, when applying the skills at work.

Following the pilot, Mater began integrating VR into live SWGJ delivery and started exploring the approach for other areas, including PPE training and other high-value conversations.