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assimilation of the physiological changes in order for
Patient Simulation
CAE HEALTHCARE 2015 CATALOG
20
A respiratory therapist at the WakeMed Center for
Innovative Learning, which provides simulation training for
all the clinicians within its pediatric program.
WakeMed Health and Hospitals
Raleigh, USA
It’s a Thursday morning in the Emergency
Department at WakeMed Raleigh Campus. An
experienced pediatric trauma physician is trying
to help a young boy who appears to be
experiencing serious respiratory distress and
is not responding to medication. Looking on
anxiously, the frantic mother is bombarding the
doctor with questions, when all of a sudden, the
boy’s father bursts through the door, demand-
ing to know what’s happening to his son and
challenging the physician’s competence. The
commotion is interrupting the physician, adding to
the difficulty of identifying the patient’s problem.
Unfortunately, the young boy arrests and dies
in spite of a valiant effort by the trauma team to
save him.
Fortunately, the boy is a PediaSIM patient
simulator, designed and built to present the
physiology of a six-year-old child, and the
mother and father are actors hired to add to the
realism and stress to the simulation scenario
being conducted by a multidisciplinary team in
WakeMed’s Center for Innovative Learning.
Pediatric medicine and critical care is a
world of low-volume, high-risk events, and as a
result, resident physicians, for example, have less
opportunity to acquire the deep knowledge and
experience required to handle life-threatening
situations.
Simulation provides the ideal remedy for
this, according to Dr. Mark Piehl, medical
director, WakeMed Children’s Hospital and
director of the Pediatric Division of WakeMed
Physician Practices.
“Because a critically ill child is much more
intimidating and anxiety-provoking to
clinicians, the extra emotion and stress can cloud
a provider’s effectiveness, but simulation gets
them used to treating children and dealing with
both positive and negative outcomes including
death,” contends Piehl, who goes on to say
that all clinicians in the pediatrics program at
WakeMed must go through simulation training.
“Nurses routinely tell us they are glad they went
through the simulation rotation because when
the real code occurred, they knew what to do
and were more confident about their role, where
they needed to be and where the equipment
and meds were.”
Educator: Innovator
Joy Thomason, RN, MSN, Assistant Professor at the Union
University School of Nursing in Jackson, Tennessee