I realize I haven't written in a while and one of my goals for the New Year is to do better, so I'm hoping to start off right! We had finals in early/mid-December (is it bragging to mention that I did get an A, and did well in my clinical evaluations?) and have been on break since, and I will say I have needed the time to recover and get ready for the next semester. We start the day after MLK day, so just over a week now. I am looking forward to it but besides Nursing 102 I'll also be taking microbiology, so that is definitely going to keep me busy.
We signed up for a new clinical rotation but I ended up at the same hospital, so I'll be back at the University of Chicago. I would like to have opportunities in other hospitals to get a wider variety of experience, but I also liked U of C so I think it'll be ok. The other difference is that this is a 6:30AM - 12:30PM slot, instead of 7AM - 1PM, so I'm going to have to wake up even earlier on Tuesdays! (The benefit to this? Minimal traffic on the way there. It's kind of fun to drive on the Chicago roads that early in the morning.)
One of the most interesting things we did at the end of last semester was work with the Medi-man that's located in the school. The Medi-man looks like a mannequin, but is hooked up to a computer system and has quite complex internal workings. The Medi-man breathes, has a pulse and blood pressure, can pass bodily fluids, has pupils that contract and dilate, and even responds to things like pills you put in the mouth, oxygen, and the AED. They can run different scenarios on the patient so that students can practice responding in an emergency without, you know, having to worry about killing an actual person. Or waiting around for the right emergency to happen. While we were in there they had him crash and two of the students had to do CPR to revive him - and it worked! (Our professor told us she had the person who runs the lab set it so the Medi-man wouldn't "die" for the first-years, because it can be too emotionally upsetting.)
Anyway as I'm sure you can imagine I found this utterly fascinating and asked if we could see the controls. There's actually a two-way mirror into the room so the person who runs the lab can watch from the control room, so we went back there and saw the computer and systems that run it. The software is pretty interesting - the whole system is set up so like in real life you can't just change one variable; if you change the patient's oxygen levels that affects other things, and the software figures it out for you. The lab manager said that when they first acquired the system they had to build their own scenarios for each simulation they wanted to do, but now there are also off-the-shelf ones you can buy from the company (I couldn't believe they didn't do that right away - it seemed like such a logical money-making opportunity). The Medi-man also has things like room gas sensors so it knows how to respond to the oxygen, and there are actually big tanks of oxygen and other gases in the back hooked up to the Medi-man so it can behave properly. We also saw the servers where all this is stored. (My IT security training kicked in and I started wondering why it wasn't locked up more than it is but I refrained from mentioning it.)
So that is a whole side of HIT that I never even thought of before I experienced it, but right away I realized what a valuable tool it was. I can't wait until we get to do more simulations in our second semester!
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