Authentic experience for health students

by Kelly Stone

Stepping into the Centenary building at UniSA’s City East campus, you’d think you had just walked into one of Adelaide’s metropolitan hospitals.

Levels four to six of the Centenary building are home to the School of Nursing and Midwifery’s Practice Based Laboratories which give nursing and midwifery students practical experience in a simulated hospital environment.

The Practice Based Laboratories (PBLs) feature a midwifery and paediatric unit, emergency department, critical care unit, surgical unit, day surgery and recovery unit, and medical unit with palliative care beds, all complete with state-of-the-art medical equipment and medical manikins.

The manikins include Noelle the birthing manikin, who can be set to give birth over a range of times from 15 minutes to eight hours. Baby Hal is in the neonatal intensive care and cries, has seizures and gives a range of simulated baby responses. Other manikins are enabled with software so they can breathe, cough, have their blood pressure and pulse taken, and students can provide total patient care as well as practising skills such as injections, catheterisation, and assessment of respiratory, gastrointestinal and cardiac health by listening to bowel, lung and heart sounds.

Program Director Dr Barbara Parker says while manikins are part of nursing and midwifery training at a number of universities, what sets UniSA apart is the new facilities mirror a real-life hospital and are staffed by real-world clinicians.

“The authenticity of the clinical setting is a major benefit for our students,” Dr Parker says.

“We have state-of-the-art equipment including an intensive care unit bed, ventilators, and birthing bed, and the manikins have case notes, medical histories and families. With experienced clinicians staffing the area, the variety of training scenarios we can provide our students is extremely comprehensive.”

Clinicians working in the PBLs include clinical nurse Tina Jenkins, who runs the critical care and surgical units the same way these units are run in major hospitals. Jenkins is enthusiastic about the impact the PBLs are having on UniSA’s 2700 undergraduate and postgraduate nursing and midwifery students.

“Students are so much more excited coming into the laboratories because they know the facilities mirror the environment they will see in a real hospital,” Jenkins says.

“It’s moving away from task-orientated learning and providing much greater engagement for students.”

Second-year nursing students Elise Noar, Jessica Collinson, Hillivi Harrison and Holly Ford say the PBLs are a highlight of their training.

Elise says the labs put theory into simulated practice.

“It’s a great opportunity to practise our skill base in a safe and nurturing environment,” she says.

Hillivi says having clinical nurses like Jenkins to learn from is especially beneficial, as is being able to learn how to administer medicines to the manikins.