Fom the interview:

“One of the key issues in nursing is the time and quality of training it takes to produce a well-qualified nurse. As in other clinical practices, the key factor is practice, and opportunities for practicing on real patients is limited. Virtual humans can take the place of real humans in training and thereby provide a more rich, diverse and intensive training experience for nurses.

We want to work with the School of Nursing to develop a suite of training devices that can not only be used for task training but also provide visualisation of processes normally not seen, e.g. how contamination spreads by viewing virtual bacteria or how a drug or injection infuses the body, etc.”

“… a computer-based assessment system will be developed to test students’ abilities in cross-disciplinary analytical, creative, adaptive and problem solving skills, as well as their ability to work co-operatively.”  I think is the issue of special interest in this project.

More details Julia Gillard’s press release

• should be developed to reflect what is comfortably achieveable in a policy area;
• not to create a governance structure to enforce change by requiring compliance.

Memorial University also has a 6 minute overview video of Second Life which is quite good.

http://www.jmir.org/2009/2/e17/

From the results section:

We found a wide range of health-related activities on Second Life, and a diverse group of users, including organizations, groups, and individuals. For many users, Second Life activities are a part of their Web 2.0 communication strategy.

The most common type of health-related site in our sample (n = 68) were those whose principle aim was patient education or to increase awareness about health issues. The second most common type of site were support sites, followed by training sites, and marketing sites. Finally, a few sites were purpose-built to conduct research in SL or to recruit participants for real-life research.