The demand for health care professionals is on the rise. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, health is the second fastest growing employment field. Kirkwood Community College in Iowa prepares students to be a part of this vital, growing profession by offering Allied Health programs that keep pace with technological advances and changes in health care.
Kirkwood’s $3.5 million simulation center opened in August 2009. The 12,000-square-foot facility offers six patient care rooms and is home to nine high-fidelity simulators. Each of these rooms has an observation classroom and one-way mirror control room making it the first fully integrated, multidisciplinary health care simulation center in Iowa.
The Kirkwood Healthcare Simulation Center serves students in the college’s nursing and Allied Health programs, as well as area hospitals, EMS (Emergency Medical Services) agencies, medical facilities, and individual health care providers. It is designed to look and feel like a hospital, giving students and health care personnel real-world experiences when they’re there.
Education Management Solutions’ (EMS) Total Digital AV system is integrated with the high-fidelity simulators, which allows Kirkwood to record three camera views, the event log, and the vital signs monitor. The captured data is indexed, archived, and made available for debriefing.
“EMS allows us to capture and integrate multiple, nuanced forms of information data, and images during our simulation experience. This has afforded us new opportunities in simulation and debriefing for nursing and other Allied Health education students,” said Mike McLaughlin, PH.D., NREMT-P, Director of Kirkwood Community College Healthcare Simulation Center.
McLaughlin identified five areas where simulation is benefiting learners at Kirkwood:
1. Freedom to fail in a safe environment
2. Exposure to high risk, low frequency patients and events
3. Standardized leaning and evaluation
4. Interdisciplinary training
5. Safety, Communication, Crew Resource Management
McLaughlin provides an example of “exposure to high risk, low frequency patients and events” in which a simulation scenario involved trouble shooting a medication pump that alarmed. A nursing student who was responsible for the pump could not get it out of alarm mode. While she was bent over working on it feverishly, one of the cameras was zoomed in on her. The video captured sweat pouring from her face. She was so focused on the physical task of troubleshooting and fixing the pump that it produced a psychological response.
“What I took away from this,” says McLaughlin, “is that although the student had this experience in a simulated environment, when it happens in a real world situation she will be that much more comfortable in the environment and not respond in such a high stress way, because it will not be the first time she experienced it.”
At Kirkwood, multiple healthcare disciplines train together. A simulation can involve EMTs and paramedics who will pick up a patient in the field and bring him into the virtual ER. Here nursing students take care of him and perhaps transfer him to the ICU where more nursing students, respiratory therapy, or nurse aides students will be waiting.
Simulation allows Kirkwood Community College faculty to teach students skills that they may not get in a clinical or observation environment. It allows them to observe how they communicate with each other and how they would respond in a stressed environment since the sessions are videotaped and can be viewed afterwards during debriefing.
A non-scientific study of respiratory therapy and nursing students surveyed by Kirkwood Community College revealed that simulation:
• Increased program capacity,
• Increased learner confidence,
• Increased learner satisfaction, and
• Decreased time from beginner to baseline competence.
Of particular interest to McLaughlin (a paramedic himself), was to compare how many students exposed and not exposed to simulation would pass the EMT or paramedics National Registry (NR) Practical Exam on the first attempt. Again, a non-scientific study indicated that 67 percent of students exposed to simulation passed the NR on the first attempt as opposed to 50 percent of students who were not exposed to simulation passed the NR on the first attempt.
“We are the first National Disaster Life Support training center in Iowa,” says McLaughlin. “A lot of places in Iowa, either hospitals or education centers, do simulation and a lot of them do it very well. What sets us apart is we think that we have a completely integrated environment.”
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[This feature originally appeared in the Education Management Solutions July 2010 newsletter. The complete online publication is available at: http://www.ems-works.com/marketing/SIM_ENCOUNTERS_Jul_2010.htm ]