Main findings
Compared to standard care, the virtual reality pain management intervention had a large effect in reducing pain and anxiety in outpatient hysteroscopy. This effect was robust, after controlling for baseline pain and anxiety expectations and a range of patient covariates. Staff and majority of the patients found the procedure to be both feasible and acceptable and patients reported a range of experiences, suggestive of the mechanisms by which VR technology may influence pain and anxiety via immersion, relaxation, distraction and imagery.
The study additionally demonstrated willingness of patients to participate and identified barriers to recruitment, non–participation, compliance or standardisation of healthcare providers care pathways through a mixed methods approach using qualitative data to draw useful insights complementing the findings from the quantitative analysis, in order to support future research and development in this area. Insights generated from the themes suggested offering a multimodal pain relief strategy to improve experience at outpatient hysteroscopy. Qualitative analysis suggested patient profiling based on history, taking into consideration patient preferences by offering a variety of distraction techniques with a range of videos to choose from were they to choose virtual reality as a distraction technique. The analysis offered key insights into patient expectations concerning the degree of pain relief possible with virtual reality technology and implementation strategies to facilitate around transfer of research finding into clinical setting.