With a new interactive mannequin, NAU nursing students will get more clinical experience outside the hospital

Although its heart beats, its lungs fill with air and it bleeds when pricked, the newest patient at Flagstaff Medical Center is no more alive than R2-D2.

Dubbed SimMan and TraumaMan, the life-like training mannequins are designed to simulate the vital signs of a real person.

They allow nursing students at Northern Arizona University and physicians at FMC to train in an environment other than a hospital.

And that has to help improve the chances of FMC training more students.

FMC officials say the use of SimMan will allow more nurses to train on a patient that is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Once FMC incorporates SimMan and TraumaMan into its teaching program, a hospital spokesperson said she believes the hospital will exceed the 100,000 training hours it facilitated last year.

The hospital currently trains, in addition to its own staff, nursing students from four colleges, including Coconino Community College and NAU.

"This is real practical training — it gives them a real hands-on experience" said Debbie Garrity, FMC's clinical coordinator of education.

Garrity said new nursing students might start their clinical rotation with SimMan, which allows students to spend hours learning a difficult procedure, like putting in a chest tube, before practicing with live patients.

By spending time with SimMan, their progress can be reviewed by instructors via a small video camera attached to SimMan's bed, Garrity said.

Arizona is below the national average when it comes to its nurses-to-resident ratio. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, Arizona averages 606 nurses per 100,000 residents, compared with the national average of 784 nurses per 100,000 residents.

At NAU, the nursing program has recently increased the amount of nurses it trains, due in part to a multimillion-dollar legislative push to increase the amount of nurses in Arizona. The nursing school now admits 140 nurses into the program every year.

Dr. Illene Decker, the interim executive director at NAU's School of Nursing, said part of the investment was used to buy the training mannequins, in addition to new faculty and training space.

"SimMan allows students to demonstrate competencies so they can go in better prepared (in the hospital setting)," Decker said.

Officials envision that nursing students, dressed in their blue scrubs, will someday crowd around these new patients, routinely taking the mannequin's vitals as they begin their clinical rotations.

Surrounded by beeping monitors, dripping IV bags and oxygen pumps, it would be hard to tell that the future nurses are training in a classroom, not a hospital ward.

Thanks to complex computer software, a teacher can create different kinds of trauma, allowing a wide spectrum of training opportunities. A push of a few buttons can send SimMan into cardiac arrest, complete with SimMan crying for help.

According to Decker, simulations teach students to recognize the different things that can happen with a patient.

SimMan and TraumaMan were donated to FMC by NAU and W.L. Gore & Associates.

An attorney for W.L. Gore, Jim Dykes, said the company was happy to help donate the dummies to FMC.

SimMan is part of a larger program, with NAU, Flagstaff Medical Center and W.L. Gore partnering to make high-tech training available for physicians, hospital medical staff, paramedics and nursing students.

J. Ferguson can be reached at 556-2253 or jferguson@azdailysun.com.