Local News

Written by Wes Schmidgall   

NORMAL —Illinois State University Mennonite College of Nursing more than doubled the size of its lab space last week when it opened the $2.6 million, 10,000 square-foot Nursing Simulation Lab.
ISU developed the Nursing Simulation Lab (NSL) located on its campus at the corner of Normal Avenue and Locust Street to meet the fast-moving advances in health care technologies and provide additional space for the college that anticipates an increase in enrollment.
More than double the size of the college’s previous lab in Edwards Hall that was 3,400 square feet, the NSL includes five patient simulators, technology-assisted assessment labs, classrooms and offices.
“This is a state of the art lab that includes more high-fidelity patient simulators and real-life models for mastering competencies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels,” said Janet Krejci, dean of the ISU Mennonite College of Nursing. “This is wonderful gift to our ISU students, but also a necessary one.”
The NSL is “a safe environment where faculty can mimic just about any patient scenario students might encounter in real-life situations,” said Krejci.
Most of the real-life simulation space is located in a virtual acute care unit that is equipped with a nurses’ station and four private patient rooms.
“Everything you would find in a regular hospital setting is in this four-room unit,” said Krejci. “Those rooms contain hi-fidelity patient simulators that can be programmed to have changes in vital signs, lung, bowel and heart sounds, wounds and just about everything else.”
Hyper-realistic manikins serve as patient simulators in the virtual acute care unit. The manikins can talk, blink their eyes, make breathing sounds and programmed to hemorrhage, bleed blood, experience heart failure, make bowel sounds and simulate other human actions.
“Patients can talk and describe symptoms and nursing students can complete necessary procedures like suctioning, IV insertion and care, assessments and more,” said Krejci.
The NSL will soon be equipped with the technology to videotape students as they interact with the hyper-realistic manikins in the virtual acute care unit.
“By November, technology will be online so that we are videotaping these student interactions so they can learn from analyzing the scenario,” said Krejci. “One of the most valuable tools of the simulation is the debriefing process and allowing students to see for themselves how they interacted with the patient, frequently learning from their mistakes. The simulation also allows us to ensure our students experience certain scenarios that they might not during their hospital clinical experiences.”
ISU Board of Trustees approved funding for the NSL in May 2010. Construction of the NSL was completed last month.
When Mennonite joined ISU in 1999, the college had 52 students and 29 full-time faculty and staff. Last week, when the NSL lab opened, the college had 418 students and 48 full-time faculty and staff. The college anticipates increases in both students and full-time faculty and staff in the future, as a result of a nationwide shortage in nurses.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates the nationwide nursing shortage will reach 1.2 million by 2020.