A new $1 million space at the Sturgeon Community Hospital is opening up, dedicated for staff to simulate medical response exercises.
The simulation centre was designed by Educate, Simulate, Innovate, Motivate (eSIM), the provincial simulation program under the Quality and Healthcare Improvement portfolio in Alberta Health Services (AHS).
Fully funded by the Sturgeon Community Hospital Foundation, the simulation centre has been a long time coming, Clinical Nurse Educator Krista Nunes said.
"We've really worked hard with a lot of advancements in education, and we were given the opportunity with the foundation to provide ourselves with the simulation doll and we needed a centre to put everything in to be able to simulate what a regular hospital room would look like," Nunes said.
"I'm really proud of not just the foundation, but also the community and donors and how they supported this initiative," the foundation's board chair Scott Olivieri said.
"When we worked through a plan of what the hospital needed this came to the forefront. The foundation's always been a supporter of the site when it comes to innovation, technology and education. And this simulation lab being a state of the art project for this site was not only going to be a legacy for this hospital, but a huge piece for the community and the team here that is going to be able to access it every day that they need it," he said.
Nunes said that the centre is built to allow for simulations of any kind of scenario staff might encounter, including cardiac events, trauma, maternity, medicine, and patient surgery.
"We can kind of run any type of scenario that we want of all the kind of patient population we would see here on site," she said.
The main room of the centre is used to be a classroom. The space has a storage room for equipment and supplies that staff may need for a simulation, as well as two breakout rooms to debrief scenarios or schedule smaller education sessions.
During the simulation, an approximately $100,000 mannequin named Grayson told Nunes that he's having trouble breathing, before she yelled for help from two other nurses, who rush in and they perform CPR on the doll. Simulation Lead Ken Brisbin sat in a room monitoring the simulation and changing Grayson's vitals.
It's designed to be as realistic and intense as possible for nurses and staff who want to simulate the kind of situations they may see on the job, stressing the importance of ongoing education for hospital staff.
"Promoting best practice, safe care, and better patient outcomes is absolutely key, and we get that through education," she said.
Educators at the hospital have had access to the centre since the spring. They've run two trauma scenarios already with the emergency department, which she said went successfully.
"The staff have been so excited to see the space and utilize it and say that it's a lot different than just trying to do it in a classroom," she said. "We're really looking forward to seeing how this takes off and seeing what kind of great things that we can do with our staff here on site."
