Mar. 8—The ominous tone of a flat line pierced the air as Gabriela Herrera-Portillo pumped furiously on the chest of a medical dummy in the patient simulation lab at Haywood Community College last week.
"Keep going, keep going," fellow nursing student Crystal Holloway encouraged, hovering over the patient's head with an oxygen mask.
All the while, Carly McDaniel kept her eyes trained on the monitor above the bed. At last, the thin green line began to pulsate again and the tension gradually faded from the nursing students' faces. They had successfully brought the patient back to life, navigating the trial run of a cardiac arrest.
"They are going to go home today and be really proud of themselves," said Sarah McAvoy, an HCC nursing instructor.
During the simulation, McAvoy acted as the proverbial man behind the curtain, controlling the dummy's symptoms and reactions to the care it got from the students. She could make it moan and talk and whimper, breathe with a rasp or a whistle, cough or alter its heartbeat.
And it was up to the students to figure it all out.
"That's the magical part of instructing — learning when to stay out of it and give them the opportunity to solve it on their own, because that's where the learning is," McAvoy said. "That's where the excitement comes in, too."
The sim lab is a critical component of a nursing student's training and is a hallmark of a new $7.8 million Health Science Education building at HCC. The new state-of-the-art facility will have eight pods with simulation dummies surrounding a central command post, allowing students to experience the real-world scenario of caring for multiple patients on a floor.
"We can put a group of students in there and say, 'These are your patients for the day. How are you going to work together? How are you going to communicate?'" said Lorene Putnam, the director of HCC's nursing program.
The capabilities to manipulate the dummies are uncanny.
"We can control the sounds in their chest. We can program them to have various symptoms and injuries. We can make them moan and talk. We can make them bleed, give them an irregular pulse, have their oxygen drop," Putnam said. "The students have to figure out what to do to intervene."
As the dummy in last week's exercise floated back into consciousness, a nursing student patted its arm and offered soothing words, another furiously scribbled notes on a clipboard, and yet another jumped on a phone to call the doctor — a role played by one of the instructors.
Deciphering a patient's needs and communicating them across the hospital is an important part of the simulations, as well — knowing when to call for a respiratory therapist, when to order labs, or when to administer medication on file.
"It's critical nurses know how to solve problems. We are the eyes and ears at the patient's bedside 24-7," Putnam said. "Knowing when they need help, when they need an order, when to call the doctor are key decisions a nurse has to make."
One thing Putnam is looking forward to with the new-and-improved simulation lab is the ability to run interdisciplinary exercises with students in other health-related fields, not just nurses. A simulation could entail a trauma case from a car accident, where paramedic students can practice transporting and handing off the patient to nursing students.
Not all training simulations will turn out so well as the one last week, however.
"There are some scenarios where the person is on a trajectory that can't be saved. And we want the students to experience that as well," Putnam said.
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