Simulator helps train medical personnel

PITTSFIELD – Stan D. Ardman arrived Thursday at Sebasticook Valley Hospital complaining of dizziness and vomiting blood. He was quickly surrounded by a team of nurses and paramedics.

Hooked up to computers, Ardman’s vital signs were monitored, his reactions to medications gauged, and the medical team constantly reassured him.

“How are you doing, Stan?” each nurse asked.

“OK,” he answered, blinking his eyes. “We are going to insert an IV,” one nurse told him.

“Ouch,” he replied, the blue sheet over his chest rising and falling with each breath.

When a nurse inserted a breathing tube down Ardman’s throat, he coughed and asked to have it removed. “I’m sorry, Stan,” she said. “This will make you feel better.”

But once Ardman was stabilized, he was unhooked and turned off. Turned off?

Ardman, whose name actually spells “standard man,” is a patient simulator – a $250,000 computerized, humanlike mannequin that breathes, blinks, speaks, bleeds, can have seizures, and even reacts to light stimulation, all through the use of computers.

He is one of three mannequins – an adult, a child and an infant – that provide trauma training for emergency room personnel and rural emergency responders in a variety of scenarios.

Stan is built to scale, with brown eyes and brown hair, and has interchangeable genitals, so he or she can be either gender. He even has a pulse.

The project is a partnership of the LifeFlight Foundation, the Maine Department of Public Safety and the Maine Health Access Fund. The Human Patient Simulator, which also is used by the U.S. military for training, will travel to 21 of Maine’s hospitals over the next 48 weeks.

LifeFlight instructor Donna Bulger said the stress-free teaching environment is invaluable to Maine hospital staff. “The first time we meet [emergency medical staff], it won’t be over a dying patient,” Bulger said Thursday.

“When we come into a small hospital, the treatment sequence can save lives,” Shawn Metayer, a registered nurse and flight paramedic with LifeFlight, said Thursday. “This process is low stress, fun and definitely promotes team work.”

“When the hospital employees first come in, they are nervous and anxious,” Bulger said. “But they quickly adapt and Stan becomes a ‘real’ patient. They leave here smiling and grateful for the training.

“It is far better that we do something wrong here than in the emergency room,” the instructor said. “If we make a mistake, we just turn Stan off and start again.”

In a back room of the $1 million mobile recreational vehicle unit, LifeFlight Foundation instructor Richard Simpson operates the computers that cause Ardman to react.

Various scenarios have been programmed into the computer, and no two situations are alike. It is Simpson’s voice that nurses hear when Ardman cries out in pain or asks that a tube be removed.

“When Stan begins to crash and things get critical, it never fails that people jump into action to save his life,” Simpson said. “That’s always amazing to watch when it happens.”