By Jean Cowden Moore
Ventura County Star
VENTURA COUNTY, Calif. — Nursing students at local colleges are practicing their skills on life-size mannequins that simulate symptoms typically found in actual patients.
The mannequins can be programmed to simulate anything from a heart attack to an allergic reaction. They talk, their tongues swell, their pulses race, and they even throw up. If students don’t diagnose and treat their condition, the mannequins get worse and eventually die.
“It’s very realistic,” said Joan Beem, director of nursing at Ventura College. “But students don’t have to be worried about the patient dying. It’s the mannequin who dies. They don’t have to worry about trying different approaches.”
Ventura and Moorpark colleges have been using the mannequins for several years. CSU Channel Islands in Camarillo recently opened a new nursing simulation lab with nine mannequins: six adults, two children and a baby. The program also plans to buy a birthing mannequin and a newborn.
More than half of nursing programs statewide are using some form of simulation in training students, said K. T. Waxman, program director for the Bay Area Simulation Collaborative.
“It is better for students and better for patients, because students aren’t practicing on real live human beings,” Waxman said.
Also, students are exposed to all sorts of symptoms and diseases that they might not come across in typical hospital training, she said.
The mannequins also could allow nursing programs, which have long waiting lists, to enroll more students, Beem said. Currently, those programs can’t expand, even though there’s a nursing shortage, because hospitals and clinics don’t have enough room to train students, Beem said.
“They could get some really significant learning from this before going into a hospital,” she said.
Students decide treatment
An adult mannequin typically costs from $35,000 to $85,000, depending on how high-tech it is and what company produced it. Children and baby mannequins cost somewhat less, from $20,000 to $58,000. All three local colleges have paid for their mannequins with grants.
At CSUCI’s simulation lab last week, a dozen nursing students gathered around a bed in a replica of a hospital room, listening through a stethoscope to a mannequin’s heart murmur and belly sounds. Then, the mannequin’s heart suddenly stopped beating.
The students, using the mannequin for the first time, took turns doing chest compressions, then decided to put in an IV. Eventually they got a heartbeat, but the mannequin ended up suffering brain damage, their instructor said.
“I’m glad this isn’t real,” Amanda Rein, 22, a second-year nursing student, said later. “I’m glad this is practice. Now is the time when you can make mistakes.”
Moorpark College has six mannequins: five adults and a baby, said Carol Higashida, associate coordinator of health services. Students use the mannequins in their first semester to do a physical assessment, she said. In the second semester, they diagnose symptoms, working with other students.
“It creates a nice, controlled, safe environment for students to learn,” Higashida said. “They enjoy it, so the anxiety factor is reduced.”
Ventura College has one adult mannequin and recently bought a pediatric one, Beem said.
Paramedics trained also
Students in both colleges’ paramedic programs also use the mannequins.
In Ventura, each nursing student gets one chance each semester to diagnose a condition simulated by the mannequin. Students typically gather around a bed, playing assorted roles, such as an upset parent or a respiratory therapist. With a mannequin, students can discuss the symptoms more openly than they could with an actual patient, Beem said.
“They learn how to best interact without the anxiety of doing it by the bedside of an actual patient,” she said.
At the same time, however, students use all the protocol they would with a real patient, said student Phyllis Franco, 49. That means they introduce themselves, address the patients by name and respect their privacy.
“You’re not going in to see a heart attack, you’re not going in to see an amputation,” Franco said. “You’re seeing a human being, and they’re vulnerable.”