BRISTOL, Tenn. – In a basement room at Bristol Regional Medical Center on Wednesday, Laura Cross and Laura Hutchinson check on a patient who’s suffering from a rapid heartbeat and severe chest pain.
“I’m feeling sick to my stomach,” the patient tells the nurses before he can be heard making loud vomiting sounds.
The patient’s heart stops and he immediately goes into cardiac arrest. Without a moment’s delay, the two nurses strap an oxygen mask to the patient’s face and start chest compressions to keep him alive. Cross and Hutchinson call for help and get ready to connect the patient to a defibrillator before he snaps back to life and tells them he’s feeling much better.
The two nurses laugh at their patient’s rapid recovery, knowing things wouldn’t have been so easy had they been working on a real patient who was suffering a real heart attack.
Instead, the pair was using about $250,000 worth of medical equipment to hone the skills needed to deal with patients who can have a heart attack at any minute.
Most of the lab’s equipment came from what the hospital already had in stock, said Director of Clinical Education Sheri McRae. The rest came from the Quillen College of Medicine at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tenn., which has teamed up with the hospital to use the simulation lab to train Bristol Regional staff.
The simulation laboratory’s main room features a specially designed mannequin that can make breathing sounds, simulate a heartbeat and has a pulse. It also includes equipment such as a defibrillator and a heart monitor that would be in a normal patient’s room.
“This is set up exactly like a patient’s room,” McRae said, adding that the room’s layout is so spot on that the hospital’s environmental staff uses the lab to practice cleaning rooms when patients are present.
The lab includes a classroom where an instructor can program the mannequin to go through a number of situations that doctors and nurses run into as part of their daily jobs. It also includes a special classroom where others can watch through one-way glass what happens in the main room and critique their colleagues on their performances.
“Usually, you only have this type of a facility in a university setting,” McRae said, adding that before they had the laboratory, the hospital’s staff had to drive to the Quillen main campus to hone their skills.
But with the lab, McRae said, she was able to put the latest group of nursing school graduates starting at Bristol Regional through a number of exercises they would normally encounter.
“It’s just going to be a lot easier now that we don’t have to drive to Johnson City,” Chief Medical Officer Roger McSherry said.
McSherry said he plans to start using the simulation lab to give the hospital’s existing medical emergency team a venue for practicing skills and learning to work better as a team when confronting tough life-or-death situations.
“Having this facility is going to make that possible,” the chief medical officer said, adding that the better the team learns to work in a simulated life-or-death situation, the better they can respond in real life.
gmclean@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2518
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