Kirkwood Center Makes “Reality Programming” a Vital Toolkit for Area Students, Current Professionals
This has been a terrible day for Sam.
The Cedar Rapids resident didn’t feel quite himself when he woke up three hours ago, and he told his wife he might not go out to play cards tonight. Then Sam complained of some heartburn and took several antacid tablets. For some reason his jaw ached. The Ibuprofen tablets his wife gave him did not help. Then thirty minutes ago he fell to the floor of the living room of their efficiency apartment.
Sam’s wife Lydia called 911 and performed the CPR methods she and Sam both learned from the American Heart Association. Within minutes an ambulance arrived and paramedics and EMTs gave Sam continued the CPR and administered a shock to his heart. They then transported him to a nearby emergency room where, a doctor, nurses and other healthcare professionals attended to Sam, giving intravenous medications and constant attention. Sam soon woke up and asked for his wife. He then lost consciousness once again as his heart began to quiver uselessly in his chest.
In moments, it was over. The health care team repeatedly tried resuscitation techniques and administered all possible treatments. The attending physician looked up at a clock and declared that Sam had died at 10:14 a.m. The emergency room team stood back and tried to collect themselves. One nurse reached across the table to touch Sam’s cheek one last time.
The team stood mute as the body was taken from the emergency room, a white sheet covering his face. An attendant pulled the gurney to a corner—and reset Sam’s software systems for the next class.
“Sam” is one of the newest learning tools at Kirkwood Community College. He and several other high-tech simulated humans are centerpieces of the new Healthcare Simulation Center set to open later in August. The simulators have been described by health care professionals as “so lifelike it’s sometimes creepy,” according to Kirkwood’s Health Occupations Director Mike McLaughlin.
“In our health care fields, these simulators are one of the biggest advances in education technology in many years. The level of sophistication is eye-opening in itself, but with every level of realism that comes with these tools, that makes our training and classroom experience that much more valuable to the students. The simulators allow the classroom experience to get a lot closer to real hospital clinical experience. The bottom line is, our students leave a Kirkwood classroom much better prepared for their initial health care job experiences,” McLaughlin said.
Those views are echoed by Kirkwood Health Science Dean Nancy Glab. She sees the new center as a “central, key experience” for the hundreds of students in her division each year.
“Preparing students for health careers is a challenging thing. It’s a fact of life that in so many health care fields like nursing, paramedic training or respiratory therapy, it’s a world where ‘let’s try that again’ didn’t exist before on the job. That is why this simulation center is so important. We are living in times where skills we can teach better, faster and more efficiently will help to keep health care costs down, make our students more prepared—and best of all, create better patient experiences now and in the future. This college has a long history of being open to new and better ways of teaching and learning. This new simulation center is a big part of that philosophy,” Glab said.
The new Healthcare Simulation Center provides 10,000 square feet of training spaces, with another 2,000 square feet of offices and reception area. Parts of the training spaces are set up as hospital patient rooms, critical care rooms and a trauma center. Other spaces look like average homes—by design. Spaces can be configured as a kitchen, living room or bathroom in a typical home. “Emergency personnel are called to a person’s house, not a hospital room or a classroom. These spaces make the training experience as realistic as possible,” McLaughlin observed.
The center will present not only the typical medical situations, but also the atypical to unusual. A full “multi-generational family” of simulators can provide realistic experiences with young children, adults, the elderly—even an expectant mother about to give birth. McLaughlin says the wide variety provides “important experiences for critical situations” in training health care professionals.
“Some clinics in our rural areas might only see one multiple birth in a decade—especially one with some complications. We can provide training for that and other rare but vitally important situations,” he added.
Located on the upper west side of Kirkwood’s Linn Hall, the center is easily accessible to emergency vehicles. This will provide training sessions that could include trauma or illness scenarios taking place some distance away, leading to emergency room experience when the trainees arrive at the center.
Kirkwood officials expect the center to start training sessions with current college credit students and area EMS and other professionals later in August. McLaughlin also expects the next year to include plans for another phase of simulated training on a wider scale to meet needs throughout eastern Iowa.
“There has definitely been interest in making these simulators available for training at clinics and other settings in some kind of portable mode. That’s an interesting idea, and our wider community partners are helping us research and plan for that. One thing is for sure—these new training tools are the present and future of health care education in America,” McLaughlin concluded.
More information on the Kirkwood Healthcare Simulation Center is available from Mike McLaughlin at (319) 398-4947, or via e-mail:
mike.mclaughlin@kirkwood.edu