A 5-foot-5-inch, 75-pound patient is on the verge of death as his heart slows down. A team of Fairfield nursing majors come to the rescue and use the skills they learned in the classroom to keep the patient alive. The patient, however, cannot be saved.
But this is not a tragedy; in this case, the patient can be unplugged and brought back to life.
“SimMan” is a life-like computerized patient simulator, created and manufactured by Laerdal Medical Corporation. There are approximately 2,000 of them in the world, one of which lies in a bed on the second floor of Fairfield’s School of Nursing.
“Currently, our sophomores are using SimMan to listen to abnormal lung and heart sounds,” said Diana Mager ’88, director of the nursing school’s learning resource center.
“They would not be able to do [the exercise] since most of the students have normal lungs,” Mager said.
SimMan can be moved throughout the School of Nursing on wheelchairs and stretchers.
“If a faculty member teaches obstetrics, for example, and none of the expectant mothers give birth while our students are present, we can create a scenario in the lab with our building mannequin so that they can have this experience,” Mager said.
Mager said she and her staff went through extensive training procedures.
“The faculty took part in a faculty development day in December to learn the way in which SimMan can be used in one room, yet displayed to other classrooms in the School of Nursing,” said Mager.
The nursing faculty has joined the “Faculty Learning Community” to apply new teaching methods in the classroom as well as hands-on settings.
SimMan was a donation by former Westport EMT Olivia Weeks. Weeks, a 2005 Fairfield graduate, is currently on the School of Nursing Advisors Board.
Nursing students said working with SimMan helps them prepare for real world experiences.
“It would be less nerve-racking than starting with a live patient,” said Siobhan Verlin ’09.
“During class we would go into a room and the teacher would [be] in the room next to us controlling the breathing sounds and heart rate of the SimMan,” said Nicole Lambert ’08.
The use of SimMan is intended to prepare nursing majors for their clinical in their senior year. Until this year, the department had only used mannequins.
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