Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Innovation showcase, HC 523
Tuesday 2 December 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 2 December 2025.
Members present: Dame Chi Onwurah (Chair); Emily Darlington; George Freeman; Dr Allison Gardner; Kit Malthouse; Samantha Niblett; Martin Wrigley.
Question 44
Witnesses
I: Dr Rebecca Chubb, Deputy Clinical Director, North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare Trust; Joe McCrea, Associate Director of Communications, North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare Trust.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Dr Rebecca Chubb and Joe McCrea.
Chair: Welcome to today’s Select Committee, the science, innovation and technology innovation showcase. The Committee wants to understand how the UK supports innovators and what more can be done. Every week we select an innovator to share their story before our main evidence session. Today’s innovator has been selected and will be introduced by Dr Allison Gardner.
Q44 Dr Gardner: This is an interesting innovator because this is from an NHS trust, Combined Healthcare, which is doing fantastic innovation across the digital arena with AI and other digital tools. I thought it would be fun to have a look at what it is doing with virtual reality. With no further ado, I am going to hand over to Joe and Dr Becky Chubb straight away to give you lots of time to explain. Welcome.
Joe McCrea: Can we start by thanking the Committee for giving us the opportunity to come and show what we are doing? We really appreciate it. We are both proud and grateful for the opportunity, in particular to Allison, who is a very valued local Member of Parliament. Thank you very much indeed.
My name is Joe McCrea. I am the associate director of communications at Combined Healthcare. We are a mental health trust in Stoke-on-Trent. I am joined today by our deputy clinical director, Dr Becky Chubb. We are here to show you two examples of innovation, which are centred on virtual reality. Rather uniquely for the NHS, we do everything in-house. Everything we are going to talk about today has been done by the NHS team in-house. It is available for free to everybody via our website, combined.nhs.uk. Search for “combined virtual reality” or “CVR”. The fundamental principle of the NHS is that it is available free at the point of use, regardless of ability to pay. The two things we are going to show are virtual reality delirium training and virtual reality service walkthroughs. With no further ado, I shall pass across to my colleague Dr Chubb.
Dr Chubb: To mark World Delirium Awareness Day 2022, we created a virtual reality training delirium film. It is a short film for frontline NHS staff and, in particular, those who care for patients experiencing an episode of delirium, but who are not necessarily delirium specialists themselves. For context, delirium essentially amounts to acute brain failure. It is usually as a result of an underlying medical cause, such as an infection or something like that. It causes the person often to hallucinate, see things, hear things and believe things, which often are extremely distressing and, at times, quite harrowing in nature. It usually affects our frail elderly population. It is extremely common and right now around one in every four patients in hospital will be experiencing an episode of delirium, so staff have regular training in this all the time.
Why innovate? There was a gap that I kept seeing. The gap was in staff’s true appreciation, understanding and, most importantly, empathy for people experiencing an episode of delirium. The trouble is that often all you see on the outside is somebody who is challenging, difficult, aggressive or confrontational. You do not see the inner turmoil that is leading to that behaviour and this misinterpretation can lead to less compassionate care at times.
The film takes just four minutes to watch. The beauty of it is it places you inside the experience of a person experiencing delirium. You see what she sees, hear her internal thoughts and witness the impact that the staff have on her, both for good and for bad. The feedback we have had has been exceptional. Probably the one piece of feedback that stood out most was a nurse who said to me, “I have nursed people with delirium for over 20 years and I had no idea that that is what might be going through their mind”.
In 2024, it became international and a Danish language version was created. A Welsh language version has been created and launches later this year for Health Education and Improvement Wales. Importantly, though, for us, the film continues to be freely available for anyone, anywhere via our YouTube channel, and to date has had over 130,000 views.
The second example to bring to you today are our virtual reality service walkthroughs. Most of you, along with most of the general public, perhaps have never set foot in a mental health hospital before. This means that our patients, families and students can feel significant anxiety visiting us in a way that perhaps they would not visiting a general hospital or a GP practice. Names such as “psychiatric intensive care unit” can create really negative images and stereotypes that are far from the reality of our modern compassionate care environments.
Practically, our wards cannot just throw the doors open and invite people in 24/7, so we created virtual walkthroughs, which are accessible both online and via a VR headset. They show all of our real clinical spaces with an aim of reducing myth, mystery and, ultimately, people’s anxiety. A film we published recently included the daughter of a patient living with dementia. She said, “Being able to see the lounge and the gardens in advance of my dad going there put me at ease. When I said goodbye, I knew he was safe, secure and treated as a person”. Since its launch, over 3,700 people have viewed the virtual walkthroughs, with over 37,000 web impressions, demonstrating clear value to patients and their families.
Joe McCrea: We are incredibly proud of these innovations, which represent only two examples of the work we are doing in virtual reality and, increasingly, AI. For example, we have built in our headquarters life-size immersive training environments with touch screens. I think that we have got the only virtual production volume in the NHS and it is all taking place in a little mental health trust in Stoke-on-Trent, which we are very proud of. We would be delighted to return to the Committee at any time if you wanted to know more about this. If you ever wanted to come to Stoke-on-Trent, we would be delighted to host you, and I am sure Allison would be a great host.
Finally, you asked us what Government, industry or other stakeholders could do to support innovation. We have three very simple suggestions. The first one is that it is World Delirium Awareness Day next year on 26 March, and there is no reason why the Department of Health and Social Care could not simply do some PR around virtual reality delirium training and say, “It is available on the web. Go and try it with your staff”.
Secondly, we think that the Department of Health and Social Care could recommend that all NHS trusts provide virtual walkthroughs of their facilities. We would be delighted to help any NHS trusts do that.
Finally, you have some details of a piece of potential research, which would be nationally significant and clinically led. We do not think that this has been done before. It would look at how virtual reality compared with AI-driven cognitive environments could support people living with dementia and memory impairment. We are quite good innovators and all that, but we know nothing about how to access research funding or anything like that, so any help or assistance that you could give us with that would be gratefully received. Can I finish as I started by saying thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to speak to you today? It is really appreciated and we are very proud.
Chair: Thank you very much, Joe McCrea and Dr Becky Chubb. Thanks, Allison, for bringing them in. It is really great to see innovation in the NHS. We hear a lot about how the NHS does not diffuse innovation as quickly as it could. It is great to see these examples in a trust. I was also particularly struck by the fact that we often think about technology and AI distancing people from each other and from their emotions, but you are showing how it can be used to increase empathy. That is really important. Thank you very much for showing us your innovation.