New lab gives ACC nursing students hands-on preparation for medical crises

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This article was published 16/12/2016 (3473 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When confronted with a potentially life or death medical crisis, it’s always reassuring to know that you’ve dealt with a similar situation before.

This was not always previously the case, fourth-term Assiniboine Community College nursing student Markus Rogalsky relayed to an audience of eager health-care education stewards on Thursday.

Rogalsky helped celebrate the grand opening of ACC’s Victoria Avenue East Campus’s Hands on Learning Opportunity (HOLO) Suite — a simulation lab that includes two state-of-the-art mannequins to better prepare nursing students for real-life scenarios.

The mannequins provide practice scenarios that are high risk for the patient but which have a low chance of happening in real life.

It’s better to have dealt with these high-risk scenarios in the past, hands-on, rather than simply reading about them in a text book, Rogalsky said, noting that in moments of high stress real-life memories come faster.

The HOLO Suite houses two mannequins, including the male Apollo and the female Lucina, who is carrying baby Felicia.

Both mannequins are state of the art for their training purposes, School of Health and Human Services dean Karen Hargreaves explained, noting that each can talk, cry, vomit, convulse, go into cardiac arrest, breathe, blink and mimic various other things that humans can do.

The Brandon campus holds approximately 140 nursing students and 40-some health care aide students, with two intakes per year of 35 nursing students and two intakes per year of 22 health care aide students.

Everyone will get hands-on time the with the mannequins, Hargreaves said, noting that they’ll be able to test a wide skill set with the near-humans, from pharmacology to nursing arts.

The mannequins can tell whether they’ve received correct dose of medication, Hargreaves said.

They didn’t come cheap, ACC Foundation president Tammy Johannson said, listing the male mannequins at about $45,000 and the female mannequins at about $75,000.

Between the Brandon HOLO Suite and a similar one in Winnipeg, donors contributed the entire $240,000 cost — an effort that an anonymous donor launched with a donation of $100,000.

The Brandon Area Community Foundation pledged $50,000 about a year ago as its first major effort to push the initiative over the edge, president Brian Cottom said of the 50-year organization.

More accustomed to pledging a higher volume of smaller donations, Cottom successfully urged the organization to purchase an entire mannequin.

It wasn’t too difficult a sell, he clarified, noting that with “any education certainly important to the health of a community such as ours,” it fell directly in line with their organization’s community stewardship mandate.

“It’s almost like we let the horse out of the barn with the board, because we’re finding that we need to raise some more money,” he said, adding that in the past year while waiting for the HOLO Suite to open they’ve pledged two more large-scale donations to other organizations to help push their projects over the edge.

While the HOLO Suite’s grand opening was on Thursday, students such as Rogalsky have already had a chance to practice their skills on Apollo, Lucina and baby Felicia.

Dealing with the mannequins felt very real, Rogalsky said, affirming that they’ve improved his sense of confidence when assisting real people.

» tclarke@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @TylerClarkeMB