Nursing students will have more of an opportunity to practice their skills in an advanced clinical setting with the newly upgraded expansion of the Simulation Lab. With the ever growing need for nurses and the enrollment of students coming into the Nursing program, there was a major need to be able to accommodate these students and continue to give them the advanced hands-on learning they will need in the field.
This is where Nursing instructor Nancy Delnay decided the simulation labs in the Biomedical Technology Center needed a major upgrade.
Before Delnay worked on securing a grant to upgrade these labs, professors would have to wait until the labs opened to take their students to practice on the high tech mannequins.
The grant was made possible from the state of Michigan through a collaboration between Schoolcraft and Oakland University for a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN). Because of this agreement, Oakland University will lobby at Schoolcraft to get graduates to transfer to Oakland for a BSN degree. Part of the grant will go to Oakland so that they can market their program here at Schoolcraft and the other part went to Schoolcraft to upgrade our facilities.
This funding is necessary to keep up with the advancements in mannequins because they run in the thousands of dollars for just one. “The babies are $50,000, the kids are $80,000 and the newest mannequin we got was $150,000,” said Delnay.
The newly expanded labs now include two new areas with SIM mannequins as well as adding an extra mannequin in the classroom, where instructors are able to share the labs, leading to more students being able to gain the experience they need.
While it is always beneficial to have students work with real patients, that’s not always possible. For students going into pediatrics, there are only 2 hospitals for pediatrics, one in Royal Oak at Corwell Health and the other is in downtown Detroit at the Children’s hospital of Michigan. Realitistically there aren’t enough spots available for every pediatric student in the area to go to these hospitals. “Children’s is the whole hospital, but Royal Oak is not, it’s a unit. And so we can only send so many groups,” explains Delnay.
These labs will also allow students to practice real world medical scenarios and grow their skill sets in a learning environment.
“The beauty of the simulation is that they can practice on mannequins that they can’t hurt, and therefore they can make a mistake. We then discuss it in their debriefing after the scenario and then they don’t make those mistakes on real patients,” said Delnay. This is a way to keep patients safe as well as provide extra training to the nurses.
While the students will be working together, playing different roles in the simulation, their instructors will sit in an adjacent room where they can supervise everything going on. The grant helped fund a second room like this that connects to the new labs. The instructors will sit behind a one way glass with a phone that is connected to the simulation room. That way students will be able to perform the simulation on their own, while also knowing that if they need help, their instructor is only a phone call away.
These expansions in the nursing lab are able to give students the opportunities they need in order to thrive at their jobs. Without grants like these, students will feel lost in a rapidly advancing world.
