By Vanessa Orr
Students entering the healthcare professions can learn a lot through reading and lectures, but there’s nothing quite like hands-on experience to teach them about the reality of caring for others as a career.
To this end, the Florida Atlantic University Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing’s Davie Campus recently opened a state-of-the-art Advanced Nursing Simulation and Clinical Learning Laboratory to provide its students with the opportunity to learn high-tech, high-touch care before working with real patients.
“The lab is designed to immerse our students in near-to-life or true-life clinical scenarios to enhance what we’re teaching in the classroom,” explained Dean Safiya George. “Students work with low-fidelity and high-fidelity mannequins, and with each other, on scenarios that give them the opportunity to think on their feet while engaging in critical thinking skills.
“The ultimate goal of the lab is to help them learn to think like nurses and to develop the critical reasoning, communication skills and assessment skills they need to take care of patients so that they can help patients achieve better health outcomes as part of the healthcare team,” she added.
The simulation lab, which opened Dec. 18, includes four individual simulation rooms containing high-fidelity mannequins, touch-screen patient monitors and cameras and microphones so that faculty can communicate with students during each scenario. The lab also contains an area for students to practice health assessments with low-fidelity mannequins, as well as a nurses’ station, medication cart and crash cart.
The lab will be used by BSN students and nurse practitioner students on the Davie campus, as well as the roughly 40 new students who will be entering campus this fall in the accelerated BSN nursing track.
“Healthcare in general is becoming more complex as people are living longer, having more comorbidities, and multiple chronic diseases,” said Dean George. “As we prepare our students to better understand the pathophysiology behind everything in terms of human body and disease, we also want them to understand how to interact with technology. Every healthcare system utilizes technology and we need to make sure that our students have access to it in a safe environment while still learning.”
Dean George adds that the simulation lab also allows students to hone their skills in high-stress environments. “Things change, things happen, and in an emergent situation, nurses need to be able to make critical decisions in a timely manner,” she said. “They need to understand how to look for cues before emergencies arise, and know how to prioritize tasks when taking care of more than one patient at a time. By experiencing these scenarios in a practice lab, students become more confident and competent, and learn to make decisions that ultimately lead to improved patient outcomes.”
According to Dean George, studies have shown that access to high-fidelity nursing simulation also correlates with how well students perform on the NCLEX, the national exam that nursing students need to pass to become licensed.
Now that the Davie Campus simulation center and lab is open, FAU also plans to update the small nursing simulation lab on the Boca campus with construction predicted to begin this spring. “We’ve outgrown the simulation center since it was built several years ago,” said Dean George. “We’ve got about 1,200 students who use the space, which only has two simulation rooms and no control room. Our goal is to continue fundraising in order to build a state-of-the-art facility on that campus.”
She notes that while being able to interact with technology is important, as a college grounded in caring science, FAU also remains committed to making sure that it graduates caring, compassionate nurses.
“It is up to us as a college of nursing to provide the highest level and quality of clinical labs and nursing simulation centers as possible so that our students can develop the clinical reasoning skills and critical thinking skills they need,” she said. “But it’s even more important to us that they become caring and compassionate nurses that we know they have the potential to become with the right resources, training and support.”
To learn more, visit www.nursing.fau.edu.
