Safe Practice Makes Perfect in Learning Medical Skills

The Surgical and Clinical Skills Center (SCSC) at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston will be the first comprehensive facility of its kind in the United States.

While some 59 percent of medical schools in the U.S. have clinical skills education facilities and others offer surgical skills training, according to a 2003 study by the Association for American Medical Colleges, no other medical school in the country offers both clinical and surgical skills training in one state-of-the-art learning center.

A key training tool at the SCSC will be the use of Human Patient Simulators – mannequins designed to realistically simulate human biological functions and reactions in the operating room. These high-fidelity devices have hearts that audibly beat, pupils that dilate, veins that pulse and lungs that breathe.

They can be programmed to simulate medical emergencies, such as cardiac arrest, and respond to treatment administered by medical students and residents, even if that treatment is in error. In this way, medical students and residents can learn valuable lessons from their mistakes without endangering the lives of patients.

“The use of high-fidelity simulators is a great way to learn. Medical students and residents can observe an adverse outcome from their treatment. They then must treat the complications, learning not only their errors, but how to manage the complications,” explained Eric F. Reichman, Ph.D., M.D., director of the SCSC. Reichman also is assistant professor and residency program director in the Department of Emergency Medicine.

Hundreds of case histories from actual patients can be stored in a database and then programmed into a human patient simulator, so that medical students and residents may get hands-on experience and learn from real-life situations. This is an advance over traditional training, in which medical students and residents often only read about or observe most emergency procedures. The use of simulators will allow training for rarely performed, as well as routine, procedures to the point of perfection.

A virtual reality PC lab at the center will house several workstations with equipment programmed with built-in “haptics,” meaning the devices realistically simulate the feel of an actual procedure.

The center will include a surgical skills suite, a clinical skills suite, two operating rooms, two conference rooms, a virtual reality PC lab, a microsurgical skills lab, 14 patient exam rooms, and 9 surgical skills lab stations.

By Wendy K. Mohon, Development