THE CHALLENGE
Great students. Limited resources.
Running a high-quality nursing program at a smaller institution comes with a familiar set of pressures. You can't hire actors to play patients. You can't guarantee every student gets the same learning experience. And that's when something important can get overlooked.
For Gregg, that something was communication training.
"It's very wearing," he explains. "I got it down over years: being a family member in the simulation lab, putting students through the psychosocial, the communication side of nursing. But then when I got put into this position as director, I couldn't spend all my time in the sim lab."
His students were technically strong, but the deeply human side of nursing — how you speak to a frightened patient, how you deliver bad news, how you hold your composure when someone is angry with you — was harder to teach at scale. And harder still to assess objectively.
The turning point
A Grant, a Headset, and a Cocky Student
The path to Bodyswaps started with an email. It was an invitation to apply for a grant that would give his program access to Bodyswaps, a virtual reality platform where students can practise real-life conversations with AI-powered characters and receive instant, objective feedback on their performance.
Hesston already had Oculus headsets, so Gregg applied. When the access came through, he ran a pilot session with a mixed group: senior nursing students and high school students enrolled in a nursing assistant course.
One student stood out immediately. "He was kind of cocky," Gregg recalls, the student was confident he'd do well as he was a 'great talker'.
Then the patient started swearing at him.
He was completely thrown. He'd been dismissing the patient's feelings rather than acknowledging them — confusing sympathy for empathy — and had no idea. As far as he was concerned, he'd been doing everything right.
The moment the student watched his own performance back, something shifted. He told the class himself: he'd thought he was a good communicator, and now he knew he wasn't.
The senior nursing students, watching from the sidelines, were less amused: "It's not fair. We should have had this."
There was, Gregg says, not a single complaint. Not from the nitpickers, not from the quiet students. "It was all high energy."
The Solution
Bodyswaps Across the Curriculum
A year later, Bodyswaps is woven into Hesston's nursing curriculum, as well as Gregg's Introduction to Healthcare Careers and Seminar in Healthcare courses. Students work through modules on public speaking, job interviews, dealing with difficult people, SBAR communication, TeamSTEPPS, and more.
The platform's AI roleplay feature has opened up entirely new possibilities. Gregg is now building custom scenarios for his ethics classes — including one where students must navigate an end-of-life conversation with a distressed family member after a clinical protocol recommends withdrawing life support.
"I set it up, I did it, and it was just like — this is a way better experience than what we were doing," he says.
And the difference Bodyswaps makes for these students is being felt outside of the classroom: on the wards.
Use cases
The Results
Nursing with Confidence
Last semester, Gregg covered for a colleague at a clinical placement in a local hospital. While there, the ward managers and nurses pulled him aside.
"They said, 'What is going on with your students? They have a higher level of confidence and communication ability than we have ever seen and they're only second semester.'"
The hospital staff were so impressed that Gregg has since started making the case for Bodyswaps to hospital management directly — pointing to upcoming changes in accreditation standards that require healthcare providers to demonstrate competency through simulation.
The evidence from mock interviews tells the same story. When two of the region's major trauma centres — Wesley Medical Center and Ascension Via Christi, both level-one hospitals in Wichita — came to campus to conduct real interviews with final-year students, their managers were visibly surprised.
"They asked me, 'Did you prep all these students?' I said, 'No — but we did a VR program called Bodyswaps where they've been practicing.' They said, 'Wow. They were completely different interviews.'"
One student, given free access to a headset for the afternoon, stayed for four and a half hours and completed every single module. No dizziness, no complaints — just engagement.
What's Next
Gregg is already planning his next move: using AI roleplay to simulate legal depositions for nursing students, preparing them for the reality of malpractice proceedings.
For Hesston College, Bodyswaps hasn't replaced the human element of nursing education. It's given every student equal access to it.
— Hero photograph courtesy of Larry Bartel, Hesston College
