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Credit: Photo by William Noel
Tom Doyle of METI looks on as teaching
assistant Rita Musanti and clinical
associate professor Ganga Mahat work
during a simulated health care
emergency.
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College of Nursing instructors have gone back to the classroom to learn how to use a new teaching tool, a patient simulator, to instruct their students on how to render emergency healthcare in scenarios that could include terrorist attacks.
Over the summer instructors learned how to use the Emergency Care Simulator (ECS), a life-sized mannequin linked to a computer system. Rutgers is the first university in the state to employ the equipment, developed by Medical Education Technologies, Inc. (METI) of Sarasota, Fla.
Using a computer keyboard, the instructor presents students with real-life scenarios and evaluates their performance in treating the patient during a simulated emergency in real time. “Emergency healthcare involves quick and confident thinking,” said Wendy Nehring, associate dean for academic affairs at the college. “This is role-playing in a safe environment. The technology allows instructors to reinforce life-saving skills with a new level of realism.”
Because of its portability, the simulator can be set up outside the classroom. “Emergency scenarios usually don’t happen in ‘ideal’ places,” Nerhing added. “Educating nurses to cope under any circumstance, in any environment, fine-tunes their skills and ultimately saves more lives.”
The opportunities for teaching emergency skills through different scenarios are endless, Nehring said. The equipment allows students to examine the “patient,”assessing general appearance, arterial and venous pulses, heart sounds and chest wall movements. ECS software can be programmed for preset conditions, and new parameters can be added to fit the learning objectives of the course.
The simulator is likely to change the way instructors present their curriculum to students. Beyond delivering lectures, instructors can provide hands-on instruction to teach students not only what procedures to use but to develop nursing knowledge and skills, such as critical thinking, communication and teamwork, Nehring said.
Plans call for the equipment to be used primarily for undergraduate and graduate students in the College of Nursing on the Newark campus beginning in the spring semester 2005. The college also has plans to bring the patient simulator to the New Brunswick campus.
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