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Sim City Training hospital to give By George Schwarz Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Amarillo is joining forces with Amarillo College and West Texas A&M University to build a hospital.
But it's no ordinary hospital and it won't compete for patients with Northwest Texas Healthcare System or Baptist St. Anthony's Health System. Instead, the hospital will be Sim City come alive. "(Medical simulation) is the use of computerized, sophisticated mannequins that can simulate medical illnesses," Dr. Richard Jordan, Tech's regional dean for the School of Medicine in Amarillo, said as he announced the plan for a "simulation hospital" Thursday. "It can be emergent medical illnesses. It can be rare, unusual medical illnesses or common medical illnesses." The idea is to expose trainees to as many medical scenarios as possible. The simulations can be repeated — like repetitions for athletes or pilots in simulator training. But the scenarios come without the need for real patients, he said. "So this is designed for trainees to reach a proficiency prior to when they independently treat patients and it's to help practicing communities in the area come back and maintain proficiency." "I think all of us would want our health care providing team to have gone through emergent conditions many times before they take care of a real live patient in a life and death situation," he continued. The simulations can be used to train health workers to respond to mass crises such as bioterrorism attacks, mass casualties and "50-car pileups on I-40," he said. "It's been a month since we've had the last one, so we're about due for another one." The mannequins can respond to medications based on a scan of a bar code, they can simulate sound and they can let trainees practice invasive procedures, such as a lumbar puncture, he said. Two simulations at the introductory event used a baby mannequin and an adult mannequin to demonstrate how a patient responds to treatment. At the baby station, Martha Howell, director of the simulation center at Scott & White, played the part of a distraught mother as a physician and medical students worked to solve the baby's problem. In another room, an adult mannequin provided a chance to practice different scenarios. Scott & White is a premier medical center in Temple, Texas, and is affiliated with Texas A&M University. Howell said Scott & White has used the simulators since 2004. "What I do takes a big team of people," she said. Jordan said the use of simulation has been validated scientifically. Articles in professional journals report on studies showing that trainees using the simulations learn faster and retain information longer. The simulation hospital will have an emergency room, adult and pediatric intensive care units, a labor and delivery suite and surgical suites, all of which will be set up like the real thing. One team will do the simulation while another team will evaluate the trainees. The teams will trade off and critique one another. The simulation hospital will cost about $12 million, with hopes for endowments to pay for it and faculty, he said. With fewer patients treated in hospitals and staying fewer days, there are fewer patients in hospitals from whom trainees can learn. A simulation hospital gives trainees an unlimited supply of patients. The three schools have a core of people who are already familiar with the use of simulation for training, he said. "With this combined staff and a state-of-the-art facility and further recruitment of technical faculty, and the combined resources of all the institutions, we think we can have a simulation hospital of national acclaim," he said. "Our students, our residents and our technicians deserve to have this latest in medical training. But more important, the people of Amarillo deserve to have health care providers that are trained in these sophisticated methods of taking care of patients." E-mail
comments about this story Posted: February 28, 2008
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