Sandburg’s Simulation Center Prepares Nursing Students With Lifelike Scenarios

  Aaron Frey
  Wednesday, May 29, 2019 10:02 AM
  Campus News

Galesburg, IL

Like something out of “The Wizard of Oz,” Tammi Lewis can stand behind a wall and control what her students see, hear and feel.

She does it by programming an electronic mannequin called a SimMan to give Carl Sandburg College nursing students patient-care scenarios in a controlled environment. This particular “patient” is a diabetic who is low on glucose.

“What they’re doing is recognizing the symptoms of hypoglycemia and critically thinking, ‘What do I do for that?’” said Lewis, Sandburg’s coordinator of clinical and laboratory services. “They’re all working together as a team, problem-solving and critically thinking.”

SimMan and the control room through which Lewis operates him are part of Sandburg’s Simulation Center, which opened last fall. The room provides a space for students to get hands-on experience without fear of the consequences for the patient.

“In clinical, they’re still the student; they’ve got all these people around them. But here, they’re the nurse,” Lewis said. “I think that’s empowering to them, to be able to go, ‘This is my decision now.’”

While Sandburg has had SimMan since 2016, it was located in a room that also served as a catch-all for supplies and other equipment, leaving space at a premium. Also, students in the adjacent Nursing Skills Lab could look through a window to see how classmates were handling their simulated experience.

“The rest of the students were able to watch what the first group did, and by the time the last group went through, they did a really good job,” Lewis said. “Now they cannot watch each other.”

That’s because the Simulation Center was moved next door into what had been a computer lab, and the window students could peer through is no longer there. The new room has ample space for both SimMan and a birthing simulator named Noelle. In addition to the extra square footage, the Simulation Center also has a dedicated control room for the instructor, complete with a two-way mirror so students can’t see in.

“It may be intimidating to the students because they know I’m sitting back there,” Lewis said. “It’s like they’re walking into a real patient room and taking care of a real patient.”

From the control room, instructors can program any of SimMan’s several functions such as his breathing, blinking, pulse, heart sounds, lung sounds, vital signs, bowel sounds and speech — even in Spanish.

“The only thing he can’t do,” Lewis said, “is sit up and work on his own.”

Instructors can hear students from the control room, and in addition to the window, they can see the students with overhead cameras placed above the mannequins. The funds for the Simulation Center’s audio and video equipment were donated by the nursing program’s Class of 2018.

Each simulation students go through has three parts:

• A preconference in which they’re given a patient report, the patient’s chart, can ask questions and are assigned roles such as primary nurse, secondary nurse and observer.
• The simulation experience itself, done in groups of three or four (students are afforded one two-minute timeout to assess and discuss the situation).
• A debriefing, where the class looks back at what it observed and learned.

“It puts them into a situation where they have to perform nursing skills and nursing assessment and nursing judgment in a critical situation,” Lewis said. “They walk into a situation, and they have to take care of him. It’s a nonthreatening environment where we can talk about things and learn about things.”

Simulated lessons on campus also can be applied to up to 25 percent of a student’s clinical hours, meaning the Simulation Center is helpful in more ways than one.

“Getting SimMan was the first step to developing a simulation program,” Lewis said. “He has to be utilized in a way that’s conducive to student success and student learning, and that’s what the Simulation Center has done.”

Tianna Watts, a second-year nursing student at Carl Sandburg College, checks the vitals on SimMan, an electronic mannequin, during a simulation in April in Sandburg’s Simulation Center. Watts and classmates used the SimMan to practice tending to a burn victim who was complaining about pain and breathing.