VR walkthrough of kidney stone surgery cut patient anxiety - especially for those over 65

Before a medical procedure, patients typically receive an information leaflet. It lists what will happen, the risks, the benefits. It uses terms like "lithotripsy" and "fragmentation" and "potential complications." And for roughly six in ten adults in England, according to health literacy research, it might as well be written in another language.

A new study tested a different approach: putting patients inside the procedure before it happens.

Standing in the virtual operating room

Researchers at University Hospital Southampton recruited 150 patients, aged 22 to 80, who were scheduled for shockwave lithotripsy - a non-invasive procedure that uses high-energy sound waves to break kidney stones into smaller pieces. Before their procedures, patients put on a VR headset and entered a virtual operating room.

Inside, they watched a 3D demonstration of the procedure. The animation zoomed into the kidneys to show the shockwaves hitting the stones and breaking them apart. Patients could move around the room, viewing the patient's anatomy and the surgical instruments from different angles. Key risks and benefits were highlighted within the visual experience rather than buried in text.

This was not a passive video. It was spatial and interactive - patients controlled their perspective and could examine the procedure from any vantage point they chose.

Before and after the headset

Using questionnaires completed before and after the VR experience, the researchers measured two primary outcomes: understanding of the procedure and anxiety about undergoing it. Both improved. Patients reported better comprehension of what shockwave lithotripsy involved and felt less anxious about the upcoming treatment.

The effect was particularly strong in patients aged 65 and above - precisely the group most likely to struggle with written medical information and most likely to face procedures requiring informed consent. There was no significant difference between male and female participants.

The consent problem

Informed consent is a legal and ethical cornerstone of medical practice. Patients must understand what they are agreeing to before a procedure. But the standard consent process relies heavily on written materials and verbal explanation, both of which assume a baseline level of health literacy that many patients do not possess.

Medical information leaflets are often written at reading levels that exceed most adults' comprehension. Technical jargon, risk percentages, and anatomical descriptions can overwhelm rather than inform. The result is that many patients consent to procedures they do not fully understand - a gap between legal compliance and genuine informed decision-making.

VR does not replace the conversation with a clinician. But it could establish a shared baseline of understanding before that conversation begins, so the discussion can focus on individual questions and concerns rather than basic procedural education.

Anxiety, understanding, and pain

There is an intriguing connection between these outcomes. Research has established links between pre-procedural anxiety, patient understanding, and pain tolerance. Patients who are more anxious before a procedure tend to report more pain during and after it. Patients who feel better informed tend to be less anxious.

The Southampton team noted encouraging preliminary signals in pain questionnaires and plans to explore whether VR consenting could actually reduce procedural pain - not by changing anything about the procedure itself, but by changing the patient's mental state going into it.

Scale and limitations

The study was conducted at a single hospital with a single procedure type. Whether the benefits of VR consenting extend to other procedures - particularly those that are more complex, higher risk, or involve different anatomy - is unknown. The 150-patient sample provides preliminary evidence but is not large enough for definitive conclusions about subgroups.

There are also practical barriers to widespread adoption. VR headsets require investment, maintenance, and technical support. The 3D medical animations must be created for each procedure type, which demands collaboration between clinicians, animators, and software developers. The technology developed for this study came from Surgassists, a UK-based medical technology company, and scaling such content across the full range of surgical procedures would be a substantial undertaking.

But the fundamental insight is simple: showing people what will happen to their bodies works better than telling them. For a healthcare system that already struggles with health literacy and informed consent, that is a finding worth building on.