The high-tech, lifelike mannequin would be downright creepy if it wasn’t such a good teaching tool.
The device, designed to look like a 10-year-old kid lying in a hospital bed, turns its head when it hears a voice. Its silicone skin feels lifelike. And it can talk — or at least transmit the voice of an instructor from another room.
The roughly $220,000 “patient simulator,” among the most sophisticated on the market, is one of many cutting-edge teaching tools now in use at LSU Health New Orleans’ Center for Advanced Learning and Simulation, a 2-year-old, $68 million investment in new technology and techniques that shows how much health care education has evolved.
A few decades ago, medical and nursing students learned entirely on the job. They’d first draw blood, start an IV or suture a laceration on real patients under the supervision of their teachers. Not anymore. Continue reading the article here