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News Grant to help bring clinic to the classroom December 10, 2007 DOBSON - A pair of students carefully turned a life-size mannequin over in its bed. It groaned. "Are you in pain, sir?" "Yes," it replied. "On a scale of zero to 10, with 10 being the worst, how would you rate the pain?" Another long, excruciating groan. "I'm going to take that as a 10." With its limited vocabulary and a few programmable vital signs, the VitaSim mannequin on the classroom bed doesn't quite compare with tending a real patient. But for Surry Community College's nursing program, it provides valuable practice and training that students can carry into a clinical setting. And thanks to a recent grant from North Carolina's Golden LEAF Foundation, patient care simulations are about to play an even more valuable role in nursing education. "I think that now we have the opportunity to totally redirect our education and our lab situation," said Carol Boles, the college's associate dean for Allied Health. "We hope to really attack that project with the ideal in mind." Allied Health faculty learned a few weeks ago that they would receive $450,000 from the foundation, which was established in 1999 to distribute the state's share of the master settlement with cigarette manufacturers for economic development projects. An earlier Golden LEAF grant helped establish SCC's viticulture and enology program. The grant money will be used to add to the nursing program's arsenal of simulation technology - some of which is so advanced that using it actually counts toward a student's required clinical hours during a course. Boles said the simulators should reduce the crunch for clinic time at local hospitals and health care facilities each semester, allowing the college to up its 190-student enrollment in the associate degree program to 220 in two years. "We're moving forward as quickly as we can with this," she said, adding that staff contacted their technology suppliers immediately after learning about the grant. They hope to have new equipment by January. Included in the purchase will be about a dozen new VitaSim mannequins. The Allied Health labs already are home to five full-grown and child-size VitaSims, which offer students some basic interaction during practice exercises. Students can take blood pressure and listen to heart and lung sounds on the VitaSims, which also have "voices" that can say "yes," "no" and groan when triggered by a teacher. But as excited as students get while working hands-on with the VitaSims, nursing instructors know they'll be even more excited by the top items on the department's shopping list. The college plans to purchase two SimMan mannequins and a SimBaby, which will take disease simulation and student interaction to a higher level. "We can program a lot of different vital signs into him," said instructor Ann Wood, one of three Allied Health instructors who already have been trained to use the SimMan. The mannequin's chest rises and falls as it "breathes," Wood said, and instructors can set up specific heart and breath rates and lung sounds through an accompanying computer program. The SimMan can even talk to students using a programmable voice. "You can build a scenario through this program," said Wood. "You can program him to have progressive heart failure." The challenge for students is to interpret the vital signs and determine what they need to do to treat the disease. Then, said Wood, the dummy can actually worsen. "So this allows them to think on their feet in a situation where no one is actually going to be harmed," she said. Although the SimMan will let students treat a disease without real consequences for a patient's health, Wood knows students still will take their practice seriously. She said she's seen students become attached to their simulated patient and cry when it "dies." "When they have a mannequin crash and die on them, they're not going to forget that," she said. The two SimMan mannequins will cost the college a total of $68,760 through the Laerdal medical supply company. The SimBaby will be another $32,400. The college also will purchase three additional copies of Virtual IV, a program that lets students use a touch pad to "palpate" a vein an insert a simulated IV while guided by a computer image. The Allied Health program already has one copy of the program, which Wood said can vary the age of the virtual "patient" and the size and placement of the vein to give students more practical experience than merely sticking a model arm. Although the new equipment can count a few hours toward the 96 to 240 clinical hours students must complete per course, the simulations will never replace the actual hospital room. "We are still in a clinical setting each and every semester," said Wood. "The benefit is they get to practice." Yvonne Johnson, Allied Health coordinator for the college, said the new equipment "is really going to help make the lab come alive." The interactive simulators will let students see disease processes, but they also will teach students "more of the art of nursing." "So this is a safe setting," she said. "It's really going to be an improvement." In addition to allowing SCC to enroll more future nurses, Boles said the new technology also should help the college increase retention by helping students grasp the information they learn more completely. Simulations also provide something the hospital sometimes can't, said Wood. "You can make any situation you can think of that can happen," she said. "... We may talk about a disease process that they never see in the hospital. Every single student will see everything." SCC will be one of about 10 community colleges in the state making use of advanced simulation technology in its nursing program. Boles said the technology has existed for years in hospitals and medical schools, but has only filtered down to nursing programs in the last five years. The new equipment should help boost a program that already is turning out highly qualified nurses. Plus, said Johnson, it should help students keep up with a rapidly changing field. "There's such a shortage of nurses that this couldn't arrive at a better time," she said.
Golden LEAF Foundation |