The HESS Helps Deaconess Health System With A Nursing Education "Dead Manikin" Challenge

 

Organization: Deaconess Health System
HESS Components Used: ICU Monitor
Other Platforms Utilized: Standardized Patients, Dead Manikin

The Story:

 

Deaconess Health System is a multi-campus hospital system in the Evansville, Indiana area. With no formal Sim Lab, active learning exercises are conducted in regular classroom and education spaces - or in-situ in patient rooms.

Edith Hoehn, MSN, RN, CVRN - a Deaconess Nursing Professional Development (NPD) practitioner trains staff for 4 of the campuses. She recently led Cardiac and Critical Care classes utilizing the HESS to make "Sim without a Sim Lab" a breeze.

As an example, the Critical Care class had a trach patient who became hypoxic with tachycardia and hypotension and students had to recognize deterioration and suction, hyperoxygenate, raise HOB and then bag patient with 100% until patient recovered. The exercise took about 30 minutes to develop an initial, deterioration and recovery phase for Pulse Ox/HR, and BP.

Not only did the HESS ICU Monitor make providing the desired real-time changing vitals easy and portable, but the HESS is helping to extend the usage of a manikin for the Deaconess team. You see, although the learners "saved" the patient in the exercise, nobody could save the manikin. As Edith tells it: "It was high fidelity, but so old it became unfixable and finally 'died'."

Additional solutions to the Deaconess team's "dead manikin" challenge include the use of Standardized Patients in some exercises - for which the HESS can easily provide real-time changing vitals as well.