UMB Lab Coordinator, Mary Pat Ulicny, MS, RN helps nursing students Domingo Baez-Diaz and Augustin Nguen Kam work on “Sim Man.”
This spring, UMB nursing students are welcoming a newcomer to the USG campus: an $88,000 human patient simulator who - for lack of any other name - is called simply “Sim Man 3G.” This high-tech teaching tool is wireless and provides students with an uncannily realistic experience that mimics working with a living patient. In fact, the entire clinical simulation lab, which underwent a complete renovation in the fall of 2009, is designed to replicate an actual hospital setting as closely as possible, explains Mary Pat Ulicny, MS, RN, the lab’s coordinator.
The UMB School of Nursing at USG includes over 200 undergraduate students.
What is most important to students, Ulicny points out, is that they have access to an advanced simulation lab before attempting to work with human patients. “It’s like training pilots on a flight simulator, so that they can make any mistakes safely on the ground,” Ulicny says.
USG nursing students use the lab regularly to practice their skills. In addition to the new “Sim Man,” the lab also has “Sim Baby”, a pediatric version. The lab also has 10 hospital beds, IV pumps, and a new medication cart that barcodes drugs and employs a scanner similar to what is being used today in clinical settings.
UMB School of Nursing recently acquired a Guldmann lift for the USG lab, one of only three such devices in use in nursing schools on the east coast. The lift trains students in how to safely move patients up to 500 pounds. Before the arrival of the new apparatus, nursing students at USG had to be transported to the Baltimore campus to learn how to use one.
The USG simulation lab is also used to test students on their newly acquired skills. The goal, says Ulicny, is to promote critical thinking, effective decision-making and patient safety in a secure environment, all of which UMB’s USG’s nursing graduates will take with them into the communities they seek to serve.