| An important part of a nurse’s education is clinical training — time when nursing students see and treat real patients in a supervised environment, to give them important first-hand clinical experience. But finding sufficient clinical placements for student nurses is an ongoing challenge, and one that Olympic College’s nursing program is all too familiar with.
“With clinical placement sites declining,” said Joan Hanten, executive director, of the Olympic College Foundation, ”it has become increasingly difficult to ensure that each nursing students gets the supervised practice and first-hand experiences needed to ensure they are confident and competent when they begin caring for real patients.”
To help mitigate this problem Olympic College found a technological solution: the Human Patient Simulator™ (HPS) — also known as the “METI man.”
The HPS is a fully robotic simulator developed by Florida-based Medical Education Technologies, Inc., considered the gold standard for patient simulators in educational medical programs throughout the world.
“Human patient simulators have quickly become the accepted paradigm in nursing education,” said Hanten, “providing an innovative learning environment where nursing students can practice clinical and critical thinking skills on a lifelike robotic simulator.”
The HPS moves, blinks, breathes and can be programmed to respond to treatments based on more than 90 nursing scenarios.
“It’s just like they’re going in to treat a patient,” said Hanten.
Faculty members can remotely run the nursing scenario programs, giving the nursing students the opportunity to “treat” the HPS and evaluate whether the treatment is effective.
“[The HPS] offers the ability for OC to provide simulation education to challenge and test nursing student’s clinical and decision-making skills during realistic patient-care scenarios,” said Hanten. “If they do everything correctly, the ‘patient’ exhibits signs of stabilization and doing better. If they don’t do everything right the simulator can worsen, up to the point of experiencing clinical death.”
Aside from supplementing, or replacing, “live” clinical training, the HPS also removes the stress of dealing with a real patient, giving nursing students more confidence.
“It’s better than working on a human being,” said Hanten, since mistakes made when treating the HPS don’t do any actual harm. “It provides students a safe, low risk environment in which to hone their practical skills.”
This is the second school year in which the HPS has been available to Olympic College’s nursing students, and its purchase was made possible by a donation from Tim and Shirley Ryan.
“This gift from the Ryan’s is an exciting step in the continued growth of OC’s nursing program,” said Hanten. “This technology will allow the OC nursing program that extra measure of educational excellence that truly puts us on the leading edge for nursing education curriculum.”. | 