County college welcomes new 'student'

[cougarnurse]

This is awesome! Guess this is the next big thing: County college welcomes new 'patient' to nursing program

There is a new patient in the nursing lab at Warren County Community College.

The Meti Emergency Care Simulator (ECS), named "Warren", was recently acquired thanks to a grant initiated by LaMont Rouse, director of the college's Division of Grant Research and Alumni Affairs.

The ECS allows nursing instructors to simulate a real-life emergency care scenario. The state-of-the-art simulator is also used by the military and various fields of medicine.

"It is as close to real as you can humanly get," said Jenn Spencer, the WCCC nursing lab coordinator. The simulator can have a heart attack, seizure or hemorrhage due to trauma, just to name a few scenarios."

"Warren" uses the same type of medical monitoring equipment that a real patient will require. This allows the simulation to be as realistic as possible for the students.

"It's really an incredible piece of equipment," noted Joan Pollner, director of nurse education at WCCC. "In almost every aspect possible, it is human!"
In a recent simulation lab where "Warren" experienced a heart attack, nursing students monitored his vitals using a real wave form display while the nursing instructor guided the scenario. When the patient went into cardiac arrest, the students moved quickly to save him.

"This technology simply was not available just a few years ago," said Pollner. "Our students are able to take advantage of this technology so that they can be better prepared for the future."

For more information about the nursing program at WCCC and any of the college's degree and non-degree programs, visit www.warren.edu.

Anyone else's school have this?

[Toddy]

Wow, I know this is really old but I'm hardly ever on these boards. Done with the ADN. In my last semester of the BSN now...phew. Regarding the robot/simulator, we have that at both my ADN and BSN programs. There is even one who will go into labor and deliver a baby! It's actually rather hilarious. These are useful tools but sometimes these articles make them sound a bit better than they really are. Just like any tool, they are only so good as the operator using them. So at my ADN program, sometimes the training on these simulators was not so good and they very often became just expensive dummies, not used to the best of their potential. My BSN program is a little better at using them and setting up whole scenarios. They can be difficult to deal with because as a student you don't always know where the line is between what assessment you are getting from paper, a tv screen or even just a nursing instructor and what you are getting from the dummy. For example, our dummies' lung sounds can be auscultated in the anterior lung field, not in the posterior. However, this is only true if the instructors actually turn the chest functions on. So some labs we would go in and everything was off and they would go, oh just read the sheet and verbalize what you would do. Then the next week, everything was on and we didn't know, and they would fail us because we "missed" something on the dummy.
Great tools, but they must be used correctly and CONSISTENTLY.

What are other students' perceptions of these simulators? - Toddy