Making respiratory assessments in children can be intimidating for new nurse graduates. Pediatric respiratory distress can be a tricky condition to identify and assess. Gaining skill at respiratory assessment in children requires repeated clinical exposure, and opportunities for such exposure during new nurses’ education and training experiences have decreased sharply since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this month’s issue, Raab and colleagues compare nurses randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups: an intervention group that used an immersive virtual reality curriculum to teach them how to recognize respiratory distress and a control group that used a usual orientation curriculum program. The 2 groups were assessed 3 and 6 months after the intervention. Their results revealed improved recognition of pediatric respiratory distress, impending respiratory failure, and altered mental status at both the 3- and 6-month mark for the group trained using virtual reality simulation compared with the other group....

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