Future doctors, nurses and other health-care practitioners can now hone their skills on some new and improved devices with completion of a patient simulation centre at the University Hospital of Northern B.C.
Housed in the centre are a mock emergency bay and a mock ward stocked with what years ago would have been called practice dummies, but have since advanced far enough that SimMan G3, SimBaby and SimNewB are now the monickers.
The simulators will allow students in health-related programs to work on delivering babies, identifying symptoms and treating patients for various types of trauma and ailments.
Heart attacks and diabetic comas and administering anesthetics were some of the examples provided by Northern Medical Program vice-provost Dr. David Snadden.
"You can pretty much do whatever you like on them," he said. "But for a lot of common conditions where acute management and resuscitation of the patient is important, it's a very good way of practicing."
A trainer can change the settings on the simulator without the students knowing.
"For example, if you want to mimic a patient bleeding rapidly, you could drop the blood pressure," Snadden said. "So you can make it very authentic and it's the ability of getting teams to practice together in that environment that's so important."
Similar but not nearly as sophisticated apparatus has been in place ever since the Northern Medical Program was launch in 2004.
"We've got lots of very low tech rubber models," Snadden said. "Our students learn to put IVs up on rubber arms."
Students also work on people, called "standardized patients" who have been trained to simulate symptoms.
"All we're really doing here is taking our simulation education to the next level," Snadden said of the most-recent acquisitions.
In all, $2.4 million was budgeted for the renovations and equipment purchases.
