Nursing school invests in practice tools
Over the summer, the College of Nursing added new medicine dispensing machines to prepare nursing students to work in real hospitals.
The new equipment will train students to reduce medication errors and increase patient safety, as they use the new machines using mannequins to rehearse real-life situations. Students will treat mannequin patients, while instructors watch and control the mannequins in a separate control room.
The machines were funded through a grant provided by the Hearst Foundation.
“These machines cost $21,000 each and we did not have the money for those,” Erin McKinney, the director of the Clinical Simulation Lab said.
The grant provided the money to construct the control room where professors can monitor the fake patients and two rooms where students can treat patients.
“Before we got the med dispense machines, when the student would go to get their patient a medication, the procedure was not realistic to what happens in the hospital,” McKinney said.
When a student is going through a scenario and they need a medication, they go to the secure, locked medicine dispense machine, sign in with a code name to get the medication and give it to the patient, as they would in a real hospital. Once the scenario is over, the student returns the medication to the machine for the next student to use.
According to McKinney, medication administration errors rank high among nursing errors worldwide, so training with this technology reduces the chance for mistakes.
“Safety is the biggest thing we emphasize in this lab, and that’s why we want students to try a variety of different things,” McKinney said. “Applying the concepts they learn in lecture is so that they become safe-practicing nurses. We want to be as close to the real thing as possible and do things in a safe manner.”