Mayo Clinic: A Day In a Lifetime

"A Day In a Lifetime" is a series of short VR experiences built for Mayo Clinic nurse and social worker leaders, co-designed with the Mayo Clinic team and drawing on the lived experience of Mayo nurses. Two peer-reviewed papers by Mayo Clinic authors document the program's rollout and its measured effect on empathy and upstander behaviour.

A Day In a Lifetime: a VR scenario built for Mayo Clinic nurse and social worker leaders.

The challenge

Mayo Clinic wanted nurse leaders equipped to recognise and respond to bias, racism and microaggressions in healthcare settings, and to role model inclusive behaviour on the frontline, rather than treat DEI as a lecture-based, one-off topic.

What was built

The experience was built around difficult, realistic situations set in a staff breakroom and a patient room. Scenarios were co-designed with nursing staff who had lived experience of workplace racism and microaggressions, many of whom identify as Black, Indigenous or people of colour. Each scenario pairs an embodiment component, where the participant experiences bias first-hand as a Black nurse avatar, with a rehearsal component, where the participant re-enters the scene as themselves and practises speaking up. The published JONA paper names the external VR developer as "the company Equal Reality, which specializes in DEI VR training."

How it was delivered

The program trained 1,149 nurse and social worker leaders (1,131 attended) across three major Mayo Clinic campuses and four US regions. Delivery combined 100 VR headsets with 28 two-hour virtual class sessions run over four months, each pairing the VR scenarios with small-group debriefs led by trained facilitators.

Results

Figures below are from the programme's own published evaluation.

From the JONA education survey (593 of 1,131 attendees responded, 52.4%), and from a separate randomised program evaluation reported in the same paper, four headline figures stand out:

93.4% said the scenario felt like real life. The papers are also candid about where the program was harder: only 61.1% rated the overall activity "very good" or "excellent," and the authors point to technical issues, discomfort with the content, or the class's mandatory nature as possible reasons.

A companion controlled study, published in Social Science & Medicine, found statistically significant increases in empathy and in willingness to act as an upstander immediately after the VR session, compared with a waitlist control group, and reported that most of those gains were still present at a 6 to 8 month follow-up.