Nursing faculty train with new manikins that will offer nursing students realistic patient healthcare scenarios

Nursing instructors in UW-Green Bay’s College of Health, Education and Social Welfare, trained recently on the new high-tech patient simulators (or manikins) inside the Aurora BayCare Nursing Skills Center on the Green Bay Campus.

Working with a trainer from the Laerdal company, faculty including Christine Vandenhouten, Susan Hopkinson, Sharon Gajeski, Nicole Gouin, Myunghee Jun and Kristin Coleman developed scenarios to simulate patient situations that will be used as part of instruction in fall 2021.

Simulators mimic real-life patient conditions complete with palpable pulses, rising chest to simulate breathing, and heart and lung sounds. The University’s medium-fidelity simulators can be programmed to cry out in pain, cough, and have special features for oral/nasal airway insertion, tracheostomy management, and catheter insertion. The result: highly realistic training scenarios.

The simulators were already in use in spring 2021, providing the critical intramuscular injection practice necessary for students to be confident in their injection skills prior to providing COVID-19 vaccinations this past spring. UW-Green Bay nursing students and faculty provided more than 700 hours vaccinating and educating at COVID vaccination sites this past semester.

While the University’s new labs allow students to have a clinical experience with low- and medium-fidelity manikins, the partnership with Aurora BayCare Medical Center will provide the opportunity for students to learn through the use of high-fidelity manikins at Aurora BayCare’s new simulation center in fall. The high-fidelity manikins are thought to provide an even more realistic clinical patient simulation.

UW-Green Bay’s partnership with Aurora BayCare ensures UW-Green Bay Nursing students are prepared to deliver high-quality, safe patient care as they train for their nursing careers.

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Photos by Sue Pischke, photographer/videographer, Marketing and University Communication

Story contributed by Joy Wick, Executive Director of Advancement, Advancement