The story of VR Therapies - part 1: From frustration to motivation
In the first of a three-part story, Rebecca Gill (founder and CEO of the Northampton-based social enterprise VR Therapies) describes her journey from learning disability nurse to award-winning Virtual Reality therapist.
In 2018, I was a very frustrated nurse. I was caring for people with long-term health conditions but weren't able to access the therapies they needed.
All the traditional therapies - physiotherapy and hydrotherapy - were getting very hard to access and I was the one who was having to go and tell people they were still on a waiting list or that their appointment had been cancelled and the next availability isn't for another five months.
I have a mood board on the wall in the office at VR Therapies. It sums up how I felt at that time and when I put it together, it was my way of visualising what I could do with my skills as a nurse - how I could help people on a community level, not the traditional way of getting a painkiller from your doctor, but looking at different ways of helping people with their wellbeing.
Once I found out about Virtual Reality, I fell in love with it. Every day there were new stories in the news about cuts to services and more restrictions within the NHS and it was clear it was going to be a long time until amazing innovative therapies were available via the NHS to the community. The more I looked into VR, the more benefits I found.
I can look at the mood board and see the whole evolution of the idea. It's personal - there are things on there that matter to me and make me feel happier, fitter and stronger.
It's looking at what matters to people, on an individual level. VR is able to do that. What makes them excited about life, what engages them. If you're not enjoying the session, you won't carry on doing physio or mindfulness or exercises.
It was swimming with dolphins that really energised me. With the benefit of VR, you're not just sitting in a pool doing exercises - you're swimming with dolphins! From a nurse's perspective, we wouldn't need to encourage people to move around or look in different directions. If a dolphin swims past you, you immediately want to follow it. You're engaging with the environment around you and you're totally immersed in it. I knew it could be a powerful tool for therapy.
My question at the time was: why isn't this available to the community? Why can only rich people benefit from advances in healthcare and technology, and what can we do to make it more accessible?
The more research I did, the more people were telling me that I needed to do it myself. It needed someone to go out there and be the person that delivers this. I was confident enough, angry enough and passionate enough to do it, and I was certainly sick of having to say no to patients.
I was fed up of having to say no to people and I wanted to be the person who said yes. I wanted to be able to say "yes, you can do it, come to our centre, experience the power of VR and take charge of your own health and fitness".