By Grace Da Rocha
Las Vegas Sun
HENDERSON, Nev. — Two students flanked Casey Maurice beside a hospital bed at Touro University, carefully working to intubate a 5-year-old patient while Maurice provided guidance and emphasized crucial techniques — maintaining composure, avoiding contact with the child’s teeth, and ensuring proper tube placement.
Dominique Gillette, a second-year osteopathic medicine student, placed her stethoscope against his chest to listen for vital signs while Payson Broome, her fellow second-year classmate, ventilated the patient’s lungs.
The procedure proceeded smoothly — or would have if this had been an actual medical emergency.
The scenario marked one of the first training sessions using Touro’s advanced new lifelike manikins, which the institution acquired earlier this year. (A manikin, not to be confused with mannequin, is an anatomical model using as a training device, not a human-shaped fashion tool.)
The toddler manikin, along with a newborn model from the same donor, will help train students who may eventually work at the planned stand-alone children’s hospital in the southwest valley.
“It’s kind of nice to be able to have the space to make those mistakes and to be surrounded by people who can guide us in the right direction now before it’s more crucial to do so,” said Gillette, 25, who moved from San Diego to study at Touro. “I’m already potentially interested in doing pediatrics ... but I think it’s just a cool way to practice before going into rotations.”
Touro’s Michael Tang Regional Center for Clinical Simulation has acquired two advanced high-fidelity manikins: Tommy, a 5-year-old pediatric patient simulator, and Christie, a newborn simulator.
The cutting-edge simulation center, one of two in the state, serves the College of Osteopathic Medicine and College of Health and Human Services by offering students essential hands-on experience with critical medical procedures before they advance to residencies and treat real patients.
In December, Touro achieved a milestone as Nevada’s first simulation center to earn full accreditation from the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, an organization dedicated to advancing simulation technology to enhance patient care performance and minimize medical errors. The center had received provisional accreditation in 2022 following years of dedicated effort by Maurice and her team.
The manikins were donated by Touro advisory member Cindy Reiman and her family, who previously contributed funding for Eve, an advanced birthing simulator named after Reiman’s mother that can replicate pregnancy and labor. Reiman chose the names for the two new manikins, which Maurice noted cost over $100,000, to honor two of her deceased loved ones.
Both manikins are operated by certified simulation center staff, allowing faculty to concentrate on instruction, Maurice said.
Christie, the newborn named after Reiman’s niece, weighs 8 pounds and can be programmed to move her limbs, mouth and eyes, and even produce crying sounds. Her skin tone can shift to represent various medical conditions, including asphyxiation or jaundice, the yellowing of skin and eyes that signals liver complications or underdevelopment in newborns.
Tommy, named after Reiman’s husband, shares these capabilities while offering additional features like enhanced facial expressions, multilingual pre-recorded speech, eye tracking and yawning. He can also simulate bodily fluids to replicate bleeding or tears during medical scenarios.
“Simulation, you think about eight years ago, these things are growing and changing as fast as they’re blinking and something new is coming out,” Maurice said. “Medicine’s always changing, so we change too.”
Medical students can perform a number of operations on the manikins with tools they’d actually use in the field, from checking heartbeats to using a real heart monitor to shock the manikin with electricity.
Doing medical work on newborn babies can be intimidating because it requires a strong understanding of their anatomical features and skill in navigating their small size, as well as the use of smaller tools, Maurice said. The pediatric manikins also reduce some of the barriers that would’ve made it harder for students to gain this experience.
Before the donation, Maurice and her team would need to find live child volunteers on whom students could practice a few skills, which took more time and limited them in the types of procedures they could conduct.
With Christie and Tommy, students not only have more opportunities for practice, but a safe space to make mistakes and safely learn new skills, such as how to conduct a baby’s first health screening, when they must perform examinations on areas such as the baby’s soft spot, referred to as the fontanelle.
It’s not just students who will get to test their skills on these manikins. Maurice and her team also recently took the manikins to Henderson Fire Department stations, where emergency personnel learned necessary courses such as advanced-level CPR for children.
“It coincided with our core classes really well, so we worked with the labor and delivery model during our reproductive course and then we just worked with the pediatric models in our current pediatrics block,” Broome said. “While I worked in a pediatric clinic before medical school, I think it’s unique ... and it was a great way to build confidence using this model.”
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