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under the OAKS
They’re No Dummies
High-tech ‘sims’ teach health science lessons
Cherry Pepper is having a bad morning.
The simulators can mimic a heart murmur. They can display
Overnight, she was tolerating fluids, walking short distances and the telltale sounds of pneumonia in a lung. They can also react to
her appetite was returning a bit in the wake of an emergency appendectomy
two days earlier.
Physical Therapy Program Director Michael Puthoff, PhD, said
repositioning in bed, a skill PT students must consistently practice.
Now, she says she is dizzy and feeling nauseous, but what really is PT students are clamoring for more such hands on experiences and
troubling her are the spiders on the ceiling of her hospital room. Kaney said plans are being made to expand use of the simulators
Something is decidedly wrong here, and it will be up to junior across the nursing curriculum.
St. Ambrose nursing students Brittani Felderman, Danika Sawyer and Nursing student Sawyer, who recently began working as a clinical
Thomas Koehler to read the signs and find the problem.
assistant in the emergency rooms at both Genesis Medical Center
The dizziness, nausea and, particularly, the creepy crawlers that Davenport campuses, said the realness of talking to the simulators
only a hallucinating Cherry Pepper can see are strong clues. The has helped her develop a better bedside manner.
insulin IV drip attached to her left arm completes the tale.
“Some people are kind of edgy when they don’t feel well,” she
The trio decides a blood sugar test is in order, discovers Mrs.
said. “So it really helps you develop your people skills, too.”
Pepper is hypoglycemic and, while Sawyer turns off the insulin drip, —Craig DeVrieze
Koehler phones the patient’s doctor for a prescription.
Watch a video of the “sims” lab at sau.edu/scene
Crisis averted. But here’s the real news: Although Cherry Pepper
isn’t a human being, she is much more authentic than those aforementioned
spiders.
Nursing, physical therapy and occupational therapy students in
SAU’s College of Health and Human Services are learning practical
lessons this year using six high fidelity simulators that are part
mannequin and part computer.
“These ‘sims’ can do anything,” Felderman said. “You can make
them do anything. You can make them say anything.”
“They can drop their blood pressure,” Koehler concurred. “They
can make them die, essentially. You have to be prepared for any
situation you could encounter in real life with these mannequins,
which is really what’s invaluable about them.”
In this setting, the “they” is Mary Lou Kaney, an assistant
professor and lab director in the nursing department. This simulation
exercise is one of countless practical nursing drills 300-level nursing
students will experience this year with the help of these high-tech
simulators. The six “sims” were purchased with grant money from
the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust, the Riverboat Development
Authority and the Scott County Regional Authority.
With teaching staff cueing a computer, the high-tech mannequins
can talk, mimic different medical issues, change breathing patterns,
heart rates and blood pressures and respond to medications. They
can be catheterized, ventilated, intubated and made up to display a
variety of wounds. One bleeds. Another gives birth.
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