| NEWS
| July 21, 2005
Nursing
School of Nursing gets a dose of virtual reality
The school is the first in the
nation to create this type of hands-on training facility.
By Megan
Wright
The Shorthorn Staff
A virtual reality emergency department
will be added to the School of Nursing’s training facilities
in fall, making UTA the first school in the nation to create such
a department.
The department will be used by students as part of the Smart Hospital,
another virtual hospital used to train nursing students. Simulation
coordinator Mindi Anderson said the program will use computerized
mannequins to simulate emergency scenarios so that students can
figure out what to do.
“It’ll be like an actual emergency department,”
she said. “They’ll be able to work like they’re
working in the ER.” Anderson said this is good for two reasons.
“It helps them learn without harming a real patient and helps
build their confidence,” she said.
Before the Smart Hospital, Anderson said students had to work on
real patients, static mannequins or each other. She said the problem
with students assessing other students is that most students are
“normal” and couldn’t simulate abnormal situations,
like wheezing.
Roger Woods, Smart Hospital simulation technician, said the virtual
mannequins give students hands-on experience because they make real-life
sounds, like breathing. He said students can see the results of
their treatments.
Anderson said the virtual mannequins function like real patients.
She said instructors can program these “patients” to
bleed, urinate, have a pulse or even die.
Nursing senior Alvin Ibana said he was working in the Smart Hospital
with classmates when their “patient” began to die.
“We were listening for wheezing on the mannequin when our
instructor made him crash,” he said. “We freaked out
and had to figure out why our patient died.”
Ibana said instructors sometimes use scripts to make the situations
more real. He said the students will ask the “sim-men,”
or simulation mannequins, questions, and the instructor will give
the patient’s answer.
“It’s like a role-playing thing,” he said. “It’s
funny, and we get to play around, but it’s serious in retrospect.”
Besides the full-body
mannequins, Anderson said the virtual hospital also uses “partial
trainers,” or specific body parts of a mannequin. For instance,
she said they have an arm that can be used to measure blood pressure,
so “we aren’t using the whole simulator.”
To work on these virtual patients, Woods said students use bought
and donated equipment from medical supply vendors and that the school
tries to get the most up-to-date supplies. Anderson said the school
will be getting a variety of virtual mannequins in the future, possibly
an infant and a birthing mannequin that actually gives birth.
“They’ll get to touch and feel the latest equipment
out there which is what they’ll be using out there in the
field,” Woods said.
The Smart Hospital, including the virtual emergency department,
is currently located on the first floor of Pickard Hall. Anderson
said the program will be “scattered throughout the building”
and needs more space.
“[Students] want more simulators,” she said. “It’s
hard to rotate 100 students through here.”
Anderson said the school is currently receiving $496,000 from the
U.S. Department of Education to equip and execute the virtual emergency
department but that they are in the process of trying to get funding
for a 15,000- to 16,000-square-foot building.
Woods said the new building would include several departments that
a real hospital would have, such as a pediatrics ward, emergency
room, maternity ward and possibly a psychiatric ward. He said it
would benefit more than just students in that it could be used to
train police, fire or Red Cross personnel and even be used in disasters.
“The second role [of the Smart Hospital] is if a major disaster
happens, we fill it with doctors and nurses,” he said. “We
already have the equipment.”
Woods said he believes the building would also motivate vendors
to give better, newer equipment and supplies because, “like
the movie, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ ”
“It would be good for vendors, good for the community and
good for our nursing students,” he said. “We’re
just waiting on funding.”
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