St. Jude College School of Nursing gets real

MANILA, Philippines – The need to bring recent graduates up to speed without putting patients’ lives at risk has made training in the field of emergency a long process. Breaking new ground in health care education, the School of Nursing of St. Jude College has fast-tracked this process by acquiring five 5th generation human patient simulators.

St. Jude College instructors can now use software to enter various emergency scenarios that challenge the students to recognize and react. With Stan responding to the students’ intervention, the latter has the power to save his life or send him into cardiac arrest. This is done repeatedly until mastery is achieved.

Therefore, students are not only learning technical skills but are also exposed to the high pressure of saving a life in an emergency situation. Furthermore, mentally preparing students for real world disasters is especially important on emergency medical services, where graduates are routinely subjected to situations that can be traumatizing both for the patient and the medical person.

For example, if a student miscalculates drug dosages, the student will witness the potentially devastating results of making that mistake. The simulator is capable of reproducing the effects of drug toxicity by simply dying in response to the drug overdose. The student gets to see the results of what happens to a patient and will therefore never make that mistake again.

In some cases, Stan is so real and the situations are so intense that the student sometimes bursts into tears if the student is unable to revive Stan. The good news is that if Stan dies, he can be brought back to life. Just like that!