Almost everything written about the return on virtual reality in healthcare was written with a hospital in mind: sedation avoided, theatre time, shorter procedures. In a care home, none of that exists. There is no theatre, no anaesthetist, no procedure to shorten.
A care home's arithmetic is different — and simpler, as long as you start with the right variable.
The variable that dominates: occupancy
In a care home, the difference between a good month and a bad one is rarely in the costs. It is an empty bed. An unfilled place is a whole monthly fee that does not come in, every month it stays that way.
Which is why the useful question is not "how much does this equipment save?", but:
Does this help fill a place, or hold on to a family comparing two homes?
If the answer is yes once a year, the arithmetic closes itself with your own monthly fee — no other lever needed. If it is no, none of the other lines will rescue the investment.
That is not a promise: it is where the decision is made. A family visiting three homes in the same month decides on visible differences, and what you can show during a visit counts.
The second line: staff time
The individual activity has a real, measurable cost: the time of whoever runs it. Allowing about five minutes to choose the scenario and fit the headset, plus ten of session, that is fifteen minutes per resident.
With one person, that means twelve to sixteen sessions a week without undoing the rest of the plan. Multiplied by your team's real hourly cost, it is a number that comes off your payroll, not ours.
The relevant comparison is not with "doing nothing" — it is with the activity that would otherwise fill that slot.
The third: what you already pay for and would now be covered
Look at what already leaves the budget and could be covered:
- outside entertainment booked once a week;
- stimulation materials bought piecemeal every year;
- building work postponed for a room that does not exist (this is where the comparison with a multisensory room comes in);
- overtime on rainy days, when the outing is cancelled and an afternoon has to be invented.
The fourth: what you can show without manual work
An automatic record of what was done, with whom and for how long. It is not a direct saving — it is clinical-director time no longer spent reconstructing memory for a family, an audit or an activity report.
A six-line model
Fill it in with your own figures. We do not publish numbers we do not control, and the ones that matter here are all yours:
| Line | What to fill in |
|---|---|
| 1. Average monthly fee | the value of one place, per month |
| 2. Unfilled places | average over the last 12 months |
| 3. Staff hourly cost | of whoever will run the sessions |
| 4. Sessions per week | 12 to 16 is the pace with one person |
| 5. Existing cost | outside entertainment and materials now covered |
| 6. Cost of the solution | equipment and subscription, per month |
The arithmetic that matters is: (1) × (probability of holding a place) + (5) − (3 × hours) − (6). If line 1 is large enough — and in a care home it almost always is — the rest of the model is detail.
What you cannot count
Do not count on reduced medication, fewer falls or clinical improvement. We have no trials supporting that for our product, and putting any of those lines into a tender builds a case that does not survive the first hard question.
What you can count is what you measure in the house: sessions delivered, who took part who did not before, real staff time, and what the family says on the next visit.
Virtual reality in a care home is a comfort, stimulation and wellbeing activity, run by trained professionals or carers. It is not treatment, it does not replace clinical assessment or prescribed therapy, and no line of this model should be presented as a clinical benefit.
RVer is a virtual reality system for clinical use designed for healthcare settings, whose base product is registered as a Class I Medical Device with Infarmed (CDM 94571546) and bears the CE mark under MDR 2017/745. The RVer Motion, RVer Neuro and RVer Exposure modules are in development and are not covered by that registration.
On where the sessions fit in the week, see a care home activity plan. On the hospital-side arithmetic, see where the saving is.