--- title: "Aged care, dementia and disability training in VR" description: "Aged care and disability workers practise dementia, changed behaviours and family talks in VR, from the people who ran QUT's VR trials in six facilities." canonical: https://peopletechrevolution.com/work/industries/aged-care-disability --- [Our Work](https://peopletechrevolution.com/work) / [Industries](https://peopletechrevolution.com/work/industries) # Aged care and disability, seen from the inside Practice shaped with residents, families and care teams, so a worker finds the words for the family at the door before the visit. The moment ## A daughter arrives on a Sunday with a bag over her arm A daughter arrives on a Sunday afternoon with a bag over her arm and a question the shift has been dreading. Whoever meets her at the door sets the tone of the visit in one sentence. A resident who refuses care, a complaint that has to be acknowledged before it can be investigated, a handover where the thing that mattered was never written down: staff ask to practise these. Your staff meet the daughter at the door and set the tone in one sentence, having tried three. Your nurses accompany the resident who refuses care, beside the rail, without the argument. Your support workers walk into an older woman’s kitchen knowing how they will open. Co-design in practice ## Central Coast Council: disability awareness Central Coast Council needed its community to understand daily life with disability. Its Access and Inclusion Reference Group co-designed a VR experience for local business, sport and recreation: a beach and a shopping centre, seen from inside the disability. Central Coast Council’s experience has run across the community more than 200 times, and teacher training, council staff training and CSIRO-facilitated sessions have incorporated it. [Read the Central Coast Council case study. Your community walks the beach and the shopping centre from inside the disability.](https://peopletechrevolution.com/work/case-studies/central-coast-council-disability-awareness) Your participants lead their own planning meeting, and your staff practise stepping back. [Disability support workers. Your NDIS support workers practise de-escalation at home and in the community.](https://peopletechrevolution.com/work/industries/disability) Working in aged care or disability? [Open the contact form](https://peopletechrevolution.com/work/industries/aged-care-disability#contact) Ask our CEO Simon Lowe’s Digital Twin a question The evidence ## What the research says, and what it does not say yet Written descriptions of lived experience fall short of the recognition a simulation from the resident’s own eyes can prompt. The [Disability Royal Commission](https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/publications/final-report) found community attitudes, not physical access alone, a fundamental driver of poor outcomes for people with disability. A [2024 systematic review](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/inm.13240) of VR simulation for informal dementia caregivers reported inconsistent quantitative results on empathy and found no controlled trials with group comparisons, so every PTR pilot ends with an [evaluation of its own](https://peopletechrevolution.com/work/research-evidence/evidence-outcomes). Your care workers rehearse the three-way conversation with a resident and a family member. Your staff rehearse the cafe outing with a companion until an ordinary moment is ordinary. Your allied health staff practise coming to eye level before it matters. The standard ## Practice that can leave a record an auditor reads Providers are now assessed outcome by outcome against the [strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards](https://www.agedcarequality.gov.au/providers/quality-standards/strengthened-quality-standards), which sit under the Aged Care Act 2024, and each outcome carries a rating of its own. An assessor asks how staff learned to handle a resident who refuses care; a sign-in sheet from a lecture answers half of that question. A scenario the same staff repeat, with who ran it and when, gives an assessor something to read, where you set it up that way. Your assessor reads which conversation a carer rehearsed, and how often they came back to it. Your staff face the resident who refuses care, with a facilitator beside them for the debrief. Your case managers rehearse the review conversation with an older man across the desk. Where the founders learned aged care ## Six facilities, two states, and a toolkit Shut in her room by the lockdowns, a resident at Arcare Pimpama pulled on a headset and walked back into the London of her youth, and [ABC News filmed her doing it](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-02/qld-virtual-reality-aged-care-centres-covid/101112460). QUT Design Lab ran those trials in 2021 and 2022 with Griffith, Melbourne, La Trobe and Monash, across six aged care facilities in Queensland and Victoria. Leonie Sanderson managed the VR work through The Ageing Revolution, under a philanthropic research grant from Facebook; what the team learned became a [free toolkit](https://research.qut.edu.au/agedcarevr/) on cost, safety, apps and space. Your provider works with the founder who ran the trials in six homes, not a vendor reading the toolkit. Your residents and workers sit together in the garden, the conversation practised before the chair was pulled up. Your coordinators learn to kneel beside the garden bed and let the residents lead. > "It just gave people - who'd pretty much been in lockdown or isolated from family and friends that sense of still being able to enjoy the world, and maybe at the age of 94 to do something they had never done before." Leonie Sanderson Co-founder, People Tech Revolution, on the aged-care VR trials she managed for QUT. [ABC News, June 2022](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-02/qld-virtual-reality-aged-care-centres-covid/101112460) Your questions ## Questions providers ask before they start The questions that come up early, answered in the words they get asked in. Your whole roster practises on a screen the home already has; the headset is the deepest version. ### Do our care staff need a headset each? Not one each. The same conversation can be written where the shift allows, or spoken at the pace a resident sets, on a screen the home already has. The headset is the deepest version of it, not the entry fee. Your physiotherapists fit one exchange into the pause beside the recliner, with nothing off the roster. ### When would anyone find the time? Between rounds. A pause at the door is long enough for one exchange, and so is a quiet stretch in the chair beside the bed. Nothing has to come off the roster. Your assessor sees which conversation a clinician rehearsed and how often they returned to it. ### What does an assessor see? Where you set it up that way, practice leaves a record an auditor can read: which conversation a carer rehearsed and how often they came back to it, rather than an attendance sheet saying somebody sat through a module. Your receptionists practise the greeting the compliance module never covered. ### Our compliance training already covers this, doesn’t it? It covers what staff should know. It leaves out the handover that happens at the door, and the daughter who arrives on a Sunday with a bag over her arm. Those are the conversations this is for. Your sunroom conversation is rehearsed by people who have run headsets in six homes. ### Have you done this in aged care before? Leonie Sanderson ran the Transforming Aged Care with Virtual Reality trials across residential aged-care facilities in Queensland and Victoria, through The Ageing Revolution and with university research partners. The [implementation toolkit](https://research.qut.edu.au/agedcarevr/) that came out of it is free. That is where the founders learned this sector. The doorway ## The doorway, and the chair beside it Aged care and disability work happens in the rooms people live in, and practice happens there too. A written rehearsal lets a worker review how they will open a conversation with a family member, using the care team’s approved guidance. Sitting down and saying it aloud is closer to the real thing: tone carries more than wording here, and a spoken run lets someone leave a silence and find out what it does. Your worker reads the opening back before walking in, against your own guidance. Your worker says it out loud in the lounge, at the height the real conversation will happen at. Your worker hears how the words land, slows down, and leaves the silence in. - [AI practice partners](https://peopletechrevolution.com/ai/ai-roleplay-practice) - [Difficult conversations training](https://peopletechrevolution.com/learn/difficult-conversations-training) - [Dementia and changed behaviours training](https://peopletechrevolution.com/work/industries/aged-care-disability/dementia-changed-behaviours-training) The library ## What practice looks like in aged care and disability services The kitchen table, the garden, the planning meeting, the ramp: each scenario in the library is an ordinary moment, rehearsed until it is ordinary. The people who live those moments helped decide which ones were built. Your staff learn to listen from the chair that was offered, before they explain anything. Your support workers let a wheelchair user lead the planting lesson. Your instructors watch an older man work without taking the tool out of his hands. - [More scenarios in the PTR VR Library](https://peopletechrevolution.com/xr/ptr-vr-library) Through the headset ## A reception desk, a garden bed, a courtyard barbecue Inside the headset the resident or the visitor is in front of you, waiting for a reply. The older man approaching the reception desk, the woman in the garden, the three people at the courtyard table: each answers what your staff say, not what they meant to say. Your reception staff greet the older man approaching the desk, and get the reply he gives. Your workers sit with an older woman in the garden and practise the pause before the question. Your staff join the courtyard barbecue and practise the conversation that is not about care. Co-designed ## Scenarios shaped with the people who will run them A resident practises a conversation from his wheelchair. A care worker practises speaking from an armchair. A support worker rehearses a coaching conversation. Each scenario was co-designed with the people who run it, in the room they run it in. Your residents help shape the scenario from the wheelchair, not from a focus group. Your care workers practise speaking from the armchair, at the resident’s height. Your support workers rehearse the coaching conversation with a facilitator in the room. On ageing, long before the headset ## A card game, a photo gallery and a company built to argue with ageism Long before anyone here picked up a headset, Simon and Leonie were arguing with the way Australia talks about growing old. They started [The Ageing Revolution](https://www.theageingrevolution.com/) for it in 2015, and it is still a company in its own right. Out of it came Carked It!, the card game about dying that won an Australian Good Design Award, and the [Pikme](https://pikme.com.au/) gallery publishers license when they want ageing shown as it is. The longer version is on [Our story](https://peopletechrevolution.com/about/story). Your provider works with founders who have argued with ageism since before the headset existed. Your volunteers rehearse the visit with a coordinator who has a wheelchair, not a script. Your clinicians practise crouching to the level of the person in the chair. Working in aged care or disability? [Open the contact form](https://peopletechrevolution.com/work/industries/aged-care-disability#contact) Ask our CEO Simon Lowe’s Digital Twin a question ## Related PTR work An aged-care build draws on PTR’s facilitated VR, including the Everyday Inclusion and Mind Shift modules in the VR Library; the government and public-sector page covers PTR’s work with the same council. - [Our approach to immersive training](https://peopletechrevolution.com/xr) - [The PTR VR Library](https://peopletechrevolution.com/xr/ptr-vr-library) - [Government and public sector](https://peopletechrevolution.com/work/industries/government-public-sector) - [All industries](https://peopletechrevolution.com/work/industries) ## Sources and further reading The research, the toolkit and the standard the copy above draws on. ### [Virtual reality-based simulation intervention for enhancing the empathy of informal caregivers of people with dementia](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/inm.13240) International Journal of Mental Health Nursing · 2024 The 2024 systematic review: inconsistent results on empathy, and no controlled trials with group comparisons. ### [National Dementia Education and Training Standards Framework](https://dta.com.au/ndetsf/) Dementia Training Australia, funded by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing The sector’s formal priority of structured, competency-based training, responding to the Royal Commission into Aged Care. ### [Final Report, Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability](https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/publications/final-report) Disability Royal Commission · 2023 Community attitudes, not physical access alone, as a fundamental driver of poor outcomes. ### [Transforming Aged Care with Virtual Reality: the Transformational Toolkit](https://research.qut.edu.au/agedcarevr/) QUT Design Lab with Griffith University, the University of Melbourne, La Trobe University and Monash University · 2021 to 2022 The free toolkit on cost, safety, apps and space that came out of the six-facility trials. ### [Virtual reality is helping residents with COVID isolation in aged care centres across Queensland](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-02/qld-virtual-reality-aged-care-centres-covid/101112460) ABC News · June 2022 The resident at Arcare Pimpama who walked back into the London of her youth. ### [Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards](https://www.agedcarequality.gov.au/providers/quality-standards/strengthened-quality-standards) Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission The outcomes a provider is now rated on, one by one. The rules behind this work ## The duty in aged care, and what the same duty looks like abroad Aged care and disability providers carry a training obligation under their own standards, and a similar one wherever else they operate. ### [Psychosocial hazards](https://peopletechrevolution.com/learn/standards/psychosocial-hazards) The duty under another name, and where practice belongs inside it. ### [The Joint Commission](https://peopletechrevolution.com/learn/standards/joint-commission-workplace-violence) At hire, annually, and whenever the program changes, with the content named and documentation required. ### [What the record has to show](https://peopletechrevolution.com/learn/standards/workplace-violence-training-records) The five fields a training record must carry, and who can ask to see it. ### [Does VR training work](https://peopletechrevolution.com/learn/does-vr-training-work) What the controlled studies measured, and what they found.