A Smart start
New simulated hospital offers real-world education

The halls of the hospital are quiet, but that won’t last for long. Some graduate students and research teams have already been inside, where patients of all sorts – infants, children, adults – are treated.

After its Aug. 24 ribbon-cutting ceremony, more students and faculty from UT-Arlington will be in the Smart Hospital, the only nursing training facility of its kind in Texas and one of only two in the nation. The hospital, which is 13,000 square feet of learning space, will make nursing graduates from the school “more confident and competent” when they enter the work force, administrators and faculty say.

The hospital is full of patients, all ready to let junior and senior nursing students practice assessments and procedures on them. The patients wonÂ’t mind that their caregivers are still learning or making mistakes, though; they are manikins, manufactured by Gatesville, Texas-based Laerdal Medical Corp., which makes dummy patients that breathe, blink, have a pulse, and can even simulate dying.

In addition to the manikins, standardized patients – actors who play roles of patients or patient family members – will help students learn the subtleties of caregiving.

“Our goal is to suspend as much disbelief as possible,” said Tiffany Holmes, manager of the Smart Hospital.

The facility, with more than 30 manikins in several units, will be used by faculty members who will bring their students through to practice what theyÂ’ve learned in the classroom. Each faculty member can decide the best way to incorporate time in the Smart Hospital into their curriculum.

Kristine Nelson and Victoria Hartman, who teach pediatric nursing classes for undergraduates, will take their students into the Smart Hospital for three separate labs. They remember learning to give injections or draw blood on oranges, or fellow classmates, when they went through school.

But with infant-like manikins and standardized patients who role-play as parents, students will have a head start when they get to the real world.

“I think the biggest fear that these students have coming into pediatrics is, ‘I don’t know how to talk to these parents,’” Hartman said.

Also, students have to approach manikins as if they are real patients, since professors can speak for the manikins through a speaker system.

“It’s an environment that doesn’t risk anyone,” Nelson said.

Beth Mancini, associate dean for undergraduates, said that using simulated patient manikins is analogous to the aviation industryÂ’s use of flight simulators.

“In high-risk areas, people have long known the importance of simulation,” she said.

Random education

Traditionally, nursing students have spent time in clinical settings, with some supervised interaction with real patients. The problem with this is that while many situations, like a patient having a heart attack, are high-risk, they are not necessarily high-frequency, Mancini said. This “education by random opportunity” can cause students to enter the work force without ever having the chance to work with a patient who may be in respiratory distress or have blood-pressure problems.

“When they feel confident here, then when they get to the hospital, they are better at efficiently using their time,” she said.

Elizabeth Poster, dean of the school of nursing, said the Smart Hospital is an extra attraction for faculty members who can use the facility for research purposes, such as studying the design of rooms so that they can be the safest and most efficient for caregivers. And while the Smart Hospital may prompt more students to apply to the school, there is a set number of student slots available each semester, Poster said.

Poster said she and her staff started thinking about the Smart Hospital in 2004. There are a handful of other simulation centers across the country, but the University of Maryland in Baltimore has the only other nursing program that features a Laerdal Center of Excellence in Simulation. The Smart Hospital is also a Hill-Rom National Demonstration Showcase; Hill-Rom, a company that makes hospital equipment such as beds, provided equipment for the facility.

As part of UT-ArlingtonÂ’s master plan, Poster said she would like to build a 100,000-square-foot Smart Hospital and Health System, which would have 60 beds and manikins and would provide even more learning opportunities for

students, who would have mock patient charts and the chance to prepare for work in an even larger, more complicated setting.

“It’s not just the technical skills, although those are important,” Poster said. “It’s the perception and the clinical frame of mind.”

Contact Bassett at ebassett@bizpress.net