Complex robots used to teach doctors

You may remember those dummies used in schools to teach CPR. Well, those medical mannequins have come a long way.

Well, they’re no dummies. They’re complex robots. And the University of Minnesota is among those leading the way in using them to make better doctors.

At the U’s Mayo building, teams of new surgical residents are moving room-to-room assessing patients in crisis. They’re training on these simulated patients at the U of M’s SimPORTAL simulation center, just as they have begun working in real life hospitals. According to the med school’s Dr. Johnathan D’Cunha, “Patients have a unique set of problems. They can fool you as it’s specially related to post op problems.“

Instructors use these mannequins who can cry, bleed and talk to run residents through different emergency scenarios.

A set of four surgical residents correctly diagnosed one of their simulated patients as having internal bleeding.

Dr. Jeffrey Chipman, co-director of Surgical Skills Simulation, says, “The patient simulators really mimic reality and the residents and students get lost in the scenario and forget they’re working on a doll or a mannequin.“

In fact a new study out of Wake Forest University, published in Medical Teacher, shows medical students learn more in these patient simulation scenarios.

Chipman says, “Medical students and residents will frequently say that the scenario that they practiced in the simulation lab they encountered later that day or later that week in the hospital.“ First year surgical resident, Dr. Juan Jose Blondet likes practicing on these patient simulations first. He says, “I already have in my mind a structured way of thinking after seeing this patient, which I’m pretty sure I’m going to encounter.“

Surgical residents have been training at the U of M’s simulation lab for three years now. Chipman describes what kind of training they got before.

He says, “We would frequently just talk about scenarios in a classroom but we wouldn’t have the physiologic response or the monitors present to simulate or mimic what was happening. We would just describe it.“ The life like mannequins are usually used to teach a task, like a surgical technique.

But the U of M is among those medical schools leading the way using mannequins to teach residents how to quickly assess a patient scenario and better use hospital resources.

D’Cunha is on a national committee trying to make such simulation the new standard of training. He says, “We’d like to more formally have this as a component to a lot of surgical education programs throughout the country.“