Human Simulation Lab 360° Virtual Tour
Human Simulation Lab
Faculty and leadership in the College of Nursing create curriculum and opportunities that will ensure their students get the best possible education and training. When the nursing students are going through training, they train in the Human Simulation lab where they work with each other, the instructors, and high fidelity manikins to learn their skills.
These high fidelity manikins are called Meti man and they have 14 total where you can identify a pulse, heart, lung and bowel sounds, their eyes can dilate or constrict according to the light, they can blink, and there is a microphone in them so an instructor can respond to the nurses questions. Meti man help provide real life situations that allow the students to gain experience before they go out into a hospital, nursing home, or a doctor’s office. Chris Smout, the simulation lab coordinator says, “I’m a nurse and I came from the ICU and there isn’t anything I haven’t been able to do on a patient in the ICU that I wasn’t able to do on these Meti man, so it allows us a lot of liberty with what we do with our simulators.”
Before these students can go out into clinical settings, they have to learn their assessments by working with each other and some of the manikins that are low fidelity. But once they have learned all of their skills, they can start doing simulations on the Meti man to get a more real life situation. Before the students can start their clinicals they have to go through several different tests to check their knowledge and understanding of their skills. The lab allows the students to perfect their skills in a safe environment.
“When they are first starting the program they are practicing on each other, so we can give them the basic skills and let them practice it in a safe environment. Then, as they get a little further on, we throw in simulators using our high fidelity manikins. Occasionally, they will bring in a standardized patient which is someone they don’t know and they will pretend to be their patient. This is mostly with the Doctorate of Nursing Practice program, not the undergraduate programs,” said Smout.
In the lab, they are always working on refining their simulations to provide the best experience for the student nurses. Smout is always working to make the lab run more effectively, and efficiently. The lab is constantly buying new equipment to stay up to date with the surrounding hospitals to make sure the students are exposed to anything they could possibly encounter. Some of the equipment they have is a med cart, which is what they use in almost every healthcare setting and an electronic charting system so the students can become more familiarized with how to chart correctly. There are task trainers such as IV arms or tracheotomy models that let them perform specific tasks multiple times, and they just purchased a new Zoll defibrillator.
The sim lab allows the students to learn their skills in a safe but realistic environment. Being able to learn these skills before going into a real world setting helps the students be more prepared and know how to properly assess their patients. “It made me super nervous to have to do the simulations but I learned a lot from them. I liked the SIMS because it makes you critically think and then take action,” said Kenzie Swafford, a graduate from the Bachelors of Nursing program. There are many different situations and settings they can run with these simulations, like emergency care, doctor’s office, or being on the Medical Surgical floor of a hospital. The human simulation lab is an important part of the learning experience for the undergraduate and graduate nursing students.
Written by: Lindsay Taylor, College of Nursing Career Path Intern
