By Kelly Phillips, staff writer
The patient may be having a heart attack. He is breathing, although via a
hook-up to compressed air.
This "patient" is Stan, a mannequin used to train clinicians at Sioux Valley
Hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on the fine points of inserting a chest
tube or saving a heart attack patient with a difficult medical history.
"He breathes. He has [pulse points]. Those things make it more realistic,"
said Kay Boik, RN, clinical care coordinator of Intensive Air, the air emergency
system for Sioux Valley Hospital. "You can give him a collapsed lung."
Though Stan is clearly only a simulated human, the signals he sends back help
deliver a life-like experience for the clinician being trained, Boik said.
"Something just takes over, and you really want to save this guy," Boik said.
"You can see on the monitor that his blood pressure’s going down, and you have
to figure out what to do to fix it. If you don’t he’ll just get worse."
That computer-controlled interactive element "makes students remember better
and get more out of the education," she added.
Staffers have taken to calling him "Meti-Man," after manufacturing company Medical Education Technologies Inc.
"He also goes by the name of ‘Stan the Man,’" Boik said, or "Stanette" if the simulated patient is female.
Stan came to Sioux Valley at a cost of around $50,000, according to Boik,
though there are more expensive models on the market that respond to anesthesia,
for instance.
Mannequins are widely used in the military, nursing schools and other
teaching settings, though not as commonly in hospitals.
Boik and her colleagues have mainly been learning their way around the
mannequin so far, but planned to put emergency room staff through their paces
with a heart attack scenario on the simulator.
The hospital’s clinical flight staff, which must perform many different
procedures on myriad types of patients, also will likely train on the mannequin.
The simulator also may help hiring managers judge the critical thinking skills
of those seeking to join the flight staff.
Because Stan can be customized, the hospital may build a scenario based on an
actual transport situation to help others learn from it, Boik said. Stan is
"pretty mobile," and could be used to enact a car accident and the accompanying
injuries, she added.
The simulator comes loaded with several patients, including: the middle-aged
Stan, who comes with no medical problems; his female counterpart, Stanette; an
elderly woman with hypertension and a history of heart problems; a truck driver
who smokes and has hypertension and other medical problems.
Those being tested by the simulator must take the medical histories into
account. Just like in real life, individual patients in the simulator will react
differently to a condition like a heart attack—and to the caregiver’s efforts.
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