MISSOULA — Nursing students often spend hundreds of hours studying the ins and outs of medical in the classroom.
But hands-on training in an environment that matches what they may see in the real-world is sometimes hard to come by.
On Friday, however, nursing students at Missoula College were given the opportunity to participate in a patient care simulation, providing real-world scenarios for the students to learn in.
“We have this cohort of 12 students that are going through these simulations,” said Linda Barnesk, the nursing program director at Missoula College.
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Students filed into the “patient’s” room (the patient in question was a manikin, controlled behind one-way glass by employees of Simulation in Montion Montana) where they then assessed the patient.
“Our students today are seeing a couple of different things. They're seeing a patient that is septic. They're seeing a patient with a severe diabetic reaction,” Barnes said.
And working with the manikin provides a more real-time experience for the students.
“It's like more of a really focused learning situation, whereas when they go to the hospitals, they might, you know, kind of sit around a little bit and not get to see some of these real intense situations,” Barnes said.
Barnes also said that they throw curveballs at the students, changing the status of the manikin throughout the scenario.
Something that provides a certain reality to the situation.
“They give us a trauma scenario. They set us up with the patient and just give us like some basics, real life situation as much as possible,” said Lauren Beach, a nursing student at Missoula College.
The students take turns treating the patient, simulating what might happen in a hospital.
“We kind of split up into two teams as in two shifts. And first one goes in, you start treating the patient and then there's a switch that happens. And then the second group goes and just kind of picks up where you left off,” Beach said.
Afterwards, they take time to discuss what happened during the scenario.
“We have an after-action review and just kind of do a debrief of what everything, you know, what was good, what was improvements for next time,” Beach said.
Overall, the training provides invaluable experience that prepares the students for what life may be like working in the medical care industry.
“This is like super heavy on critical thinking and like actual real-life scenarios where we're taking everything that we're learning in class and in the classroom and kind of trying to apply it to an actual patient. So this is much more like here we are into our real nursing positions rather than like we're, you know, learning what we're supposed to be learning. Now we're applying those, you know, skills to an actual scenario,” said Blake Yarnall, another nursing student at Missoula College.
The students will train on both Friday and Saturday, with the students who are participating in this training expected to graduate this coming August.
