Forest Hills Hospital Surgical Nurses Destress With Virtual Tech

FOREST HILLS, NY — The past two years have been stressful for hospital workers and that includes nurses who have been burning out due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which has been followed by a monkeypox outbreak and a rise in polio infections.

To help its personnel, the Long Island Jewish Forest Hills, which is a part of the Northwell Health System, gives its some of its nurses a virtual break from their workday stress via the Oculus Quest 2, a virtual headset that takes its users to the battlefield in a galaxy far, far, away, to a sandy beach or to other picturesque destinations.

The hospital started a pilot program with the headsets on Aug. 1 and one of the users was nurse Ilya Musheyev, who uses it to explore the solar system, according to LIJ Forest Hills.

“I feel like I’m floating,” Musheyev, 31, a Kew Gardens resident, said in a statement. “You’re taken into a new dimension and you become part of that environment.”

The purpose of the program is to help nurses in the surgical post-operative wing of the hospital, a chaotic place, to find an environment where they can relax, meditate and cognitively refresh, the hospital said.

“They come back after using the device with a little more mental clarity, which hopefully will
address nursing burnout,” Merrill Matthew, director of patient care services at the hospital said in a prepared statement. “LIJ Forest Hills is trying to think outside the box to address the stress level of health care workers, which we saw escalate with the pandemic.”

Two years ago, the hospital was an epicenter for Covid-19 and there was a surge of patients in the surgical wing, the hospital said.

“We saw patients decompensate very quickly,” Musheyev added. “And sometimes, there wasn’t much we could do about it.”

The nurses will be able to use the headsets for another two months and during the trial period will complete a survey about their stress levels.The data will help decide if the program will be rolled out to other wings of the hospital and other facilities within the Northwell Health system.

The hospital is located at 102-01 66th Rd.