With more than 3,500 staff members and 800 patients, Western State Hospital operates at a scale that makes training both critically important and logistically complex. New employees must be prepared to work in a highly sensitive environment where safety, awareness, and patient understanding all matter from day one.
CM&D created a five-part virtual reality training series designed to help hospital employees better understand the lived experience of severe mental illness while preparing them for the realities of working inside a large behavioral health facility. Built around immersive 360 video and delivered through an interactive VR menu system, the experience gave staff a more immediate and memorable way to engage with training content than traditional formats alone.
The final program became a cornerstone of the hospital’s updated employee training process, giving Washington State DSHS and Western State Hospital a scalable immersive training tool built for real institutional use. The project also required the deployment, setup, and support of more than 75 VR headsets, reinforcing CM&D’s ability to deliver not just the content itself, but the broader training system around it.
The Goal:
Create a training experience that helps hospital employees build empathy, situational awareness, and readiness for working in a high-sensitivity mental health environment. The broader goal was to strengthen staff preparation at scale through a more immersive and impactful training format.
Our Approach:
CM&D approached the project as both a content development effort and a full training deployment. The experience needed to support the realities of institutional onboarding, align with the hospital’s curriculum, and remain practical to deliver across a large workforce. We combined immersive 360 storytelling with strategic implementation planning to create a training series that was emotionally grounded, operationally sound, and built for repeatable use.
Key elements of the project included:
