By Charles Romans
Carter County Times
A recent grant from King’s Daughters and Sons Foundation will allow KCU’s Yancey School of Nursing to improve training in their already exemplary nursing program. That improvement comes in the form of two high-fidelity manikins purchased from Gaumard, a company that provides simulation-based healthcare workforce training solutions. The manikins, a pediatric and newborn named Hal and Tory respectively, will allow nursing students to better respond to ‘live’ emergencies in the field.
The grant, combined with a previous grant, will also allow KCU to build a comprehensive simulated pediatric and neonatal intensive care unit. Dr. Carol Brickey, the Dean and Chief Nurse Administrator of the school said that the combination of the new construction and the manikins will provide staff and students with a very realistic critical care setting for children.
“The manikins we had before were what are called static manikins,” Brickey explained. “They were basically a manikin in a bed that students can’t really interact with. The new ones have a lot of technology integrated into them. They actually breathe and have body sounds like heartbeat. They open their eyes and respond, and cry real tears.”
“And because of that, the child manikin can even communicate and talk to the students,” she continued. “And they can do what they can do with a real person, like take their blood pressure, they can start IV’s and be hooked up to a ventilator.”
There is even a crash cart simulation where the manikins can be defibrillated, Brickey said.
“It just creates a realistic environment where our students can make clinical decisions better than they could with just a regular manikin.”
Due to the technology involved, instructors can also better monitor the students’ work, such as in the case of CPR.
“It gives the student feedback and responds,” Brickey said. “If they are not doing it correctly the (manikin) will continue to decompensate. If they are doing it correctly the child will recover. It just makes the whole environment more realistic to learn I think.”
They new manikins also allow instructors to create custom scenarios, or situations the students might encounter in a real world setting, Brickey said.
“Then they will have to quickly assess what is going on and respond, and make a clinical decision based upon what they know. And it allows them to practice that in a safe space before they encounter that with a real patient.”
Brickey said they call it a ‘safe place to make mistakes’ before an actual living person is involved.
“It helps them to think about what they would do in a real-world situation. And we use a lot for feedback to use in their evaluation of how they communicate with each other, family members, and patients.”
From an instructor’s perspective it also allows them to determine what a student does not know and how to best teach them. And the instructor can get a clear picture of which areas a student excels at as well, Brickey said.
“In world healthcare, patients in the hospital are more sick than they have ever been,” Brickey said. “So being able to put them (students) in a complex clinical situation in a learning environment where they feel safe is really going to prepare them.”
One scenario where students interacting with the new manikins provides better training is when a patient decompensates.
“You may have a patient who has had some kind of procedure done,” Brickey explained. “Their vital signs are normal, and their blood pressure is where we want it, their heart rate is where we want it. Then suddenly they might be having more pain than what we would expect. Then the blood pressure is a little lower than what we would say is normal. So slowly they are developing symptoms of not recovering the way we want them to.”
The manikins, she said, allows the instructor to create those symptoms and measure how quickly the student picks up on the cues – without a real patient ever being in danger. Or, more pointedly, before a real patient is in danger, so that the students will be prepared to react to those cues.
“The sooner you take action, the better the outcome for the patient,” Brickey said. And better patient outcomes are always the goal in any healthcare.
Contact the writer at charles@cartercountytimes.com
