You
might call SimMan a glutton
for punishment.
Go ahead—give
him an injection, using real IV fluids: his arm has all the anatomically
correct veins, and when they get worn out, well, there are more where
that patch of skin came from. Program him to have a breathing problem
(he breathes on his own, quite realistically) and make his teeth clench
together (technical term is trismus). They may break if you’re
too rough putting in the breathing tube, but he won’t scream, complain
or sue. And you’ll have a better idea how to perform an intubation next
time. You can take his pulse or his blood pressure, and you can program
either one to rise or fall, using SimMan’s software on your laptop computer.
Want to see your nursing students try their hands at CPR or defibrillation?
No sweat—just set the controls for a cardiac arrest, and he’ll oblige.
You can give him a broken leg—feel the broken shinbone, right there beneath
the ugly bruise!—or bring him in with his toe dangling off. He can make
vomiting noises, too.
SimMan—er, Laerdal
SimMan Universal Patient Simulator, made by Medical Plastics Laboratory—is
the latest and most advanced addition to the School of Nursing’s Mathias
J. Brunner Instructional Technology Center. The center—which was made
possible by a gift from Dr. Lillian S. Brunner Ed’45 Hon’85, and named
after her late husband, Mathias J. Brunner GME’47 —opened in October.
It features a wide range of manikins and high-tech lifesaving equipment.
SimMan’s willingness
to let nursing students learn the vital tricks of their trade on his remarkably
lifelike but unfeeling body should make those future nurses a lot better
equipped to carry out the tasks on real people. His arrival on the scene
this month also gives the school the distinction of being the first in
the country to integrate him into its curriculum.
“Patient-care
simulation is somewhat new,” says Jackie Roberts, the center’s project
manager, “but this advance [SimMan] is really new. It’s different
because it’s real-sized; it’s real-weighted; and you can actually perform
real clinical work on it. So once a student performs a skill on it, their
comfort goes up, which decreases errors and their anxiety level in the
clinical setting. Patients are safer as a result of [students’] practicing
on it, because it’s so real.”
Teachers can
change a given scenario by adjusting the program on their laptop. “That’s
the important part about teaching,” Roberts says. “If you had to do the
same thing all the time, the students would get used to what you’re going
to say, but with this—you’ll know [whether] they know everything. It’s
always making them think.”
