Waterbury Hospital Gets Patient Care Simulators

WATERBURY –– The addition of two patient care simulators will enable Waterbury Hospital to offer a higher level of hands-on training to staff and other health care providers during advanced life support classes. The purchase of two Sim-Man units, made possible through a $58,000 donation from the Waterbury Hospital Auxiliary, will make the training sessions closer to “real-life” situations.

 A Sim-Man trainer is a lifelike adult mannequin that breathes, vocalizes, and responds to therapeutic interventions directly, via control handsets, or a laptop computer. In addition, Sim-Man can be programmed to run complex “scenarios” prewritten by instructors covering many of the common critical incidents or situations in medicine.

 “One of the most difficult and important interventions a health care provider must respond to on a daily basis is the patient who is suffering from cardiac and/or respiratory compromise or arrest,” said Dr Craig Mittleman, director of the Emergency Services Department at Waterbury Hospital. “For health care providers, those instances require deliberate, yet prompt, decisions. There’s often not a second chance to react. Sim-Man will provide those in the class a chance to replay the decisionmaking process again and again, thus better preparing them to handle such instances in the field,” said Dr Mittleman, who is a Newtown resident.

“The human simulators will provide us the opportunity to deal with unstable patients in outpatient clinics, medical-surgical wards, and emergency rooms, among other places, those being trained can learn about and react to any number of possibilities again and again,” said Ralph Miro, EMS coordinator at Waterbury Hospital.

 “In addition to the patient based scenarios,” said Mr Miro, “the simulators will also be used for training the lay public in critical interventions such as CPR and use of the automatic external defibrillator. Because of the lifelike quality of these simulators, we anticipate that students with little or no medical training will find learning first-responder medical care much easier, and enjoyable, which will ultimately result in more individuals learning to save lives.”