'Dummies' help build skills at Arkansas school

At Northwest Technical Institute: NWAnews.com :: Northwest Arkansas' News Source

SPRINGDALE - Senior nursing students Jodi Hankins and Brandi Huffaker said they could use their imaginations or a breathing, role-playing volunteer to practice medical procedures in their school lab.

But the computerized mannequins purchased recently by Northwest Technical Institute make their learning seem real, actually more lifelike, than the lower-tech alternatives.

"It's just not the same," Huffaker, 20, of Lincoln, said Thursday during a demonstration of the models.

Instructors seated across the room can throw them curves, using software on MacBook laptops to program a range of dummy responses, such as blinking, talking, heartbeat, pulse rates and respiration.

"You can get different scenarios," said Hankins, 20, of Arkadelphia, who, like Huffaker, is seeking a certificate in licensed practical nursing. "Such as, if you give them a med, and it raises their blood pressure."

"There's even bowel sounds," Hankins added.

During the 2007 legislative session, the institute received $236,429 from the General Improvement Fund for the simulation lab equipment, said George Burch, the school's president.

The school got three computerized dummies, which for Thursday's tour were dressed as a grown man, a little boy and an elderly woman, that cost about $65,000 each, said Mandy Allen, the lab's coordinator.

The appropriation also allowed the institute to expand its existing cast of two noncomputerized dummies to five, buy the software and switch to motorized hospital beds so students could more easily practice the body mechanics of moving patients, she said.

The institute's officials said during Thursday's news conference they plan to look into ways that others in the community can benefit from the lab, such as area hospitals, medical and pre- medical students, and students at other Northwest Arkansas nursing schools.

The institute has 46 seniorlevel nursing students and 50 "prerequisite" students who are taking core courses with plans to major in nursing later, Allen said. The school also offers a "bridge" program, in which instructors from Northwest Arkansas Community College hold a satellite course in the room next to the institute's simulation lab, allowing students who get an LPN certificate from Northwest Technical Institute and pass their state LPN certification to enter the community college's associate degree program that trains registered nurses.

Institute officials said they are the first in Arkansas to use a brand of virtual patient technology from Medical Education Technologies Inc., a company with headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Sarasota, Fla.

Mannequin technology itself is not new in the state.

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences has used low- and high-tech mannequins for years, and schools such as the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith have started using them, as well.

UAMS spokesman Leslie Taylor said her school uses the virtual patients in areas such as its Clinical Skills Center and the College of Medicine's anesthesiology department, so that a variety of medical students, nursing students and those studying other health-related profession get exposure.
"It's a good tool, because it allows them to practice in these stressful situations before they have to practice on a real patient," she said.

Linda K. Calhoun is a UAMS assistant professor of nursing who coordinates the baccalaureate of science and nursing program in the school's College of Nursing.

"Simulation is something that's been around for decades," she said. "It's just that it's progressed, technologically over time, to be much more lifelike.

"Their skin is lifelike skin, they have blood vessels - unlike in the '60s or '70s. They are physiologically and anatomically accurate, even in the way that blood vessels are placed."

The trio of dummies in the institute's lab Thursday had pulse points that could be seen and felt, a heartbeat and breathing movements.

Students can perform all sorts of invasive procedures on the dummies - depending on the level of the students' program - that would be unsafe to practice for the first time on a real person, such as starting IVs, inserting urinary catheters, drawing blood and intubating patients. They also can practice dressing wounds and giving medication.

"Certainly, you wouldn't want students putting catheters into their peers," Calhoun said. "You don't want the students to have their first practice on a patient, who is sick in the hospital."

The most invasive procedures the program's students will use on the dummies include starting IVs, inserting nasal-gastric tubes, inserting catheters and performing enemas, Allen said.

The virtual models are so essential to education, UAMS' Calhoun said, that they are used throughout nursing programs, even by advanced students who already are working with live patients.

"Everybody works on models - they just work on different ones," Calhoun said. "Even your smallest community college nursing setting, they have probably one model, at least."