High-tech mannequins turn into actual patients for hands-on teaching
T. Scott Boatright, Reporter
09-30-2009
GRAMBLING — A family found itself hospitalized in the Grambling School of Nursing building as a father, mother in labor and young boy rested in bed tethered to all kinds of monitoring and other devices.The family lived through their medical difficulties — but only because instructors at GSU decided they would.
GSU’s School of Nursing held an Open House Tuesday to showcase its state-of-the-art simulation laboratory, which was funded by a U.S. Department of Education grant and offers students realistic patient-care scenarios.
The family were human patient simulators who can talk, moan, breathe, maintain a pulse and even vomit when directed to do so via computer.
On the first floor of the Nursing Building is a three-bed lab with three lifelike mannequins, including Sim Man G3, the latest upgrade the university just received in August. Upstairs is a second Pediatric/Neonatal Sim Lab with a mother in labor, a young boy and a newborn baby.
“They’re great learning tools because while it’s a simulation, everything is as real as possible,” GSU assistant nursing professor and Simulation Lab Director Steve Jordan said.
“These mannequins can sweat, breathe and cough. They have pulses in their arms and can blink. We can keep up with drugs being administered to the mannequins because the levels show up immediately on an instructor’s computer.”
Jordan said the lab classes work by having two students as hands-on practitioners working with the “patients” with eight other students observing. Instructors then program in “case scenarios” where the patients can “suffer” from any medical problem the instructor desires.
The labs have domed “surveillance” type cameras covering each bed with a strong condenser microphone. After the “case scenarios” are over, the students go into a debriefing meeting where they watch a video and listen to recordings of the patient sessions to find out what they did wrong and/or right.
“Most of the learning comes during that debriefing,” Jordan said. “We stress the things the students have done right while also hitting on the things they could have done better. We’ll tape the session on memory disc and then come out into the main room where everyone can view it on a big, pull-down screen.”
GSU president Horace Judson attended Tuesday’s Open House and came away impressed.
“What I saw was impressive,” Judson said. “I knew the nursing program had invested in this kind of technology, but it’s really something once you see it and experience it in action. It’s top-line technology that will help us make our students be the best they can be.
“It’s mind-blowing, really. Feeling the pulse in a mannequin’s arm or the tactile feeling of putting a needle in their arms. It’s just like practice on a real patient, but better because you don’t have to experience on a real person.”
The mother in labor Sim in the neonatal/pediatric Sim Lab can “give birth” at any speed an instructor wants, from five minutes to five hours. It also presents sounds of both the mothers’ and infant’s heart rates.
When GSU vice president Robert Dixon listened to the heartbeat of a infant Sim, he noted to assistant nursing professor Jamil Norman that the heartbeat was “faint.”
“That’s because we want the students to really have to listen, because that’s what a real newborn’s heart sounds like,” Norman responded.
After the baby is born to the Sim mother, the umbilical cord must be cut before the infant is brought to an isolette (incubator), checked and cleaned up.
Realism is the key to the Sim Lab. Even decorations, like wallpaper with toy trains and race cars on it for the “room” with the pediatric Sim patient in it, are considered.
“He’s a boy, and boys like trains and race cars,” Norman said. “We just want the room to be like the patients and be as realistic as they can possibly be.
The equipment doesn’t come cheap — the Sim Man G3 cost $60,000 in itself. But in light of today’s economy, it seemed like the best way to go for GSU nursing students.
“With today’s economy and HMOs, they are a lot less people in hospitals than before. And there’s a nursing shortage, so more schools are fighting for those ‘hands on’ clinical spaces with fewer patients.
“The simulation labs lets the students experience the same exact situations as they would with a real patient. The only difference is that a mistake won’t hurt a Sim patient. Because of few hospitalized real patients, we don’t get to have the students see as many acute illnesses as we’d like them to see. We can throw any of those kinds of illnesses at them with the Sim Lab.”
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