Welcome to St. Jude College

Stan can breathe, bleed, and talk. He urinates, salivates, and cries. His chest rises and falls as if he were breathing. He has a pulse. His eyes blink and tear, its pupils dilate and contract, and his tongue swells. His blood pressure falls, his heart races, his internal organs bleed, and his lungs collapse. He can be hooked up to an IV or stuck with a syringe and get realistic blood in return. Stan can mimic an arterial wound, complete with spurting fake blood, or an allergic reaction in which a patient’s tongue swells, closing off the airway. He can mimic not just a simple heart attack, but a heart attack for a patient with diabetes and hypertension and who is allergic to a certain drug. Stan accurately mirrors human responses to such procedures as CPR, intravenous medication, intubation, ventilation, and catherization. Maybe the only thing Stan can’t do is stand up and walk away.

If Stan sounds familiar, it is probably because similar simulator models have guested or starred in TV series such as Grey’s Anatomy, ER, and Doctors. Stan is actually Stan D. Ardman, a 5^th generation human patient simulator (HPS). Stan is capable of mimicking the anatomical workings of the human body to a level of realism in 90 medical emergency scenarios, with tens of thousands of different physiological combinations and interactions. Stan has at its core sophisticated mathematical modes of human physiology, which are cardiovascular, respiratory, neurological, and pharmacologic. These modes imitate human response in multi-layered, real-time ways that are vital to a truly objective learning experience.

Until recently, the only way for a doctor or a nurse to learn a new procedure was to practice their skills on actual patients. But there are obvious problems with using humans as “guinea pigs”, so technology’s answer is the use of sophisticated simulators to teach students. While students can also get their practical experience in their hospital internships, there are scenarios that are impossible for students to experience. If a hospital patient experiences a code blue, where he stops breathing and his heart stops beating, that is not the best time for a student to get involved. Faculty cannot control when those unpredictable situations will occur and cannot guarantee that the students will be ready for those situations when they do happen.

With Stan, situations which students might never experience during a hospital internship can be recreated in a controlled environment before they can be experienced in the real world. Also, when students go into a clinical setting, it is not known what kind of patient they are going to get. With a human patient simulator like Stan, if the topic of the week is the heart, the professor can guarantee that the students are going to have a heart condition to deal with that week.

Therefore, the students have the opportunity to learn in a safe environment where they can make mistakes and not hurt anybody. While it may be all right to make mistakes in other professions, it may not be true in emergency medicine where the level of competence and confidence can have life or death repercussions.

The need to bring new hires and recent graduates up to speed without putting patients’ lives at risk has made training in the field of emergency a long and labor-intensive process. Breaking new ground in health care education, the School of Nursing of St. Jude College has fast-tracked this process by acquiring five 5^th generation human patient simulators. St. Jude College instructors can now use software to enter various emergency scenarios that challenge the students to recognize and react. With Stan responding to the students’ treatment, the latter has the power to save his life or send him into cardiac arrest. This is done repeatedly until mastery is achieved.

Therefore, students are not only learning technical skills but are also exposed to the high pressure of saving a life in an emergency situation. Furthermore, mentally preparing students for real world disasters is especially important on emergency medical services, where graduates are routinely subjected to situations that can be traumatizing for both the patient and the medical person.

For example, if a student miscalculates drug dosages, he will get to witness the potentially devastating results of making that mistake. The simulator is capable of reproducing the effects of drug toxicity by simply dying in response to the drug overdose. The student gets to see the results of what happens to a patient and will therefore never make that mistake again.

In some cases, Stan is so real and the situations are so intense that the student sometimes bursts into tears if he is unable to revive the patient simulator. The good news is that if Stan dies, he can be brought back to life. Just like that.