Medical School Training Goes High-Tech

High-tech formulation tools help med students prepare for the reality of modern-day medicine.

Rare just a decade ago, high-tech simulation centers like the one at the Stanford University instill of Medicine are part of a geological fault taking place in medical checkup education, fue lead by calls from the Institute of Medicine and key bodies like the American wellness check Association to bring medical training into the 21st century.

 

Practicing on a medical mannequin capable of blinking, breathing and scour bleeding has safety device benefits. But simulations also let develop doctors and nurses practice working seamlessly as members of a team, getting a feel for what it will be like to care for long-sufferings on board anesthesiologists, radiologists, pharmacists and allied health professionals.

"Physicians know that the medical education of the prehistorical does not prepare us for the kinds of care we deliver," says Susan Skochelak, group vice president for medical education for the AMA, which is giving $10 one thousand thousand in grants to med directs to boldly shake up their tenet methods and lessons.

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It used to be that medical students deft with real patients acting as guinea pigs. Today's Wi-Fi enabled mannequins, operated by staffers in a control room, do just abtaboo anything a real patient does, including responding to the drugs medical students give them.

Some 86 out of 90 medical schools and all 64 teaching hospitals that responded to a 2011 survey by the Association of American Medical Colleges report that they now use simulation to train medical students. adept of the newest facilities, the 90,000-square-foot Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation at the University of South Florida Health Morsani College of Medicine, uses technology and actors to simulate everything from childbirth to contend medicine.

The technology is a key tool in implementing a second innovation: training all sorts of medical professionals together. The ebullition of knowledge over the last half century has led to a highly fragmented health care system, where strong suit is increasingly narrow — cardiologists become electrophysiology cardiologists, arrhythmia cardiologists and transplant cardiologists.

Consequently, medical students should increasingly post to find themselves in "interprofessional" relationships, training and organise patient care with students in nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy and other departments.

New York University School of Medicine, for example, pairs first-year med students and NYU nursing students to care for a virtual patient and in simulations. Students are assessed on their ability to work together. Experts expect the team approach to medicine to reap multiple benefits for patients, including fewer errors, shorter hospital stays and better care overall.

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With health reform putting a premium on patient-centered care, safety is itself much more widespread a medical school topic. Some 62 percent of schools now report teaching students about the urgency of precautions such as infection barroom strategies and using checklists. In one exercise, medical and nursing students at the University of Missouri School of Medicine partnered to assess patients' risk of gloams — a major safety hazard in hospitals — and created customized fall prevention plans for them.

Materials taken from US News