Bequest gives hospital new learning center

MUNCIE, Ind. (AP) - nside an IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital room, hospital staffers trade off performing chest compressions on a man lying in a hospital bed.

Afterward, they gather in the room next door to watch video of their efforts filmed by two cameras mounted overhead and played back on a screen that also displays the patients monitor throughout. An instructor points out mistakes visible in the playback, such as someones arms held at the wrong angle while doing compressions, and a pause of longer than 10 seconds before beginning the next round.

After offering their own critiques and observations, the group files back into the hospital room to gather around the patients bed and try it all again.

Thankfully, the setting isnt actually inside the hospital itself, and the flatlining patient in question is a mannequin and is in no danger; the exercise is part of a class being taught in the Janice B. Fisher Learning Center, a new facility providing simulation technology and mannequins for training new and current IU Health BMH employees. An open house for the public is scheduled for Thursday, The Star Press reported (http://tspne.ws/1reRXdz ).

The space in the basement of the Edmund F. Ball Medical Education Center includes not just offices for the hospitals Education Resources program, plus classrooms and computer labs, but also three simulation rooms built to mimic specific areas of the actual hospital.

Two of them are replicas of rooms in the hospitals South Tower, with a nurses station in the hall providing windows into a patient room on either side, and the same storage, beds and equipment used in the hospital itself.

A third simulation room matches a trauma room in the hospitals Emergency Department, down to the carts filled with supplies and the sink installed where it would be in the ED, even though this one isnt actually hooked up to a water line, noted Joni Casperson-Bates, simulation coordinator for the center.

In addition to learning procedures and skills in a space that exactly mimics what theyll find on the job, students at the learning center also use highly sophisticated mannequins that can be made to breathe, bleed, choke and even answer questions.

The centers high-tech mannequins include a newborn, a toddler, a child and several adults. They can be programmed to have labored breathing, suffer bleeding or even amputated limbs or turn blue around the lips from a lack of oxygen, all while their vital signs are shown on a monitor, as with a regular human patient. They can have tubes put down their throats or IVs hooked up, and can be revived with a working defibrillator; the female mannequin can even give birth.

The sim-patients can even answer the health care providers bedside questions, either with preprogrammed responses or by having an instructor talking for the patient from the next room. Casperson-Bates demonstrated with the child mannequin, known as Junior, using a small tablet to make him cough, moan with pain, answer Yes to a question or make gagging noises.

Go here to read the rest:
Bequest gives hospital new learning center