Simulation and Skills Lab Helps Students Hone Skills

Students in health sciences are seeing innovative facilities and cooperative work throughout the University of Nevada’s Health Sciences System thanks in part to a generous gift from The Lincy Foundation.

The simulation and skills lab at the Shadow Lane campus will feature high fidelity mannequins that allow students to practice their nursing and medical skills. These life-like mannequins can be programmed with specific diseases and symptoms and respond to treatment to help nursing and medical students work in a realistic environment.

“It provides a real life situation for students to practice thinking on their feet,” said Catherine Prato, a doctoral student in the nursing program who also works as a graduate assistant.

In August 2008, The Lincy Foundation donated $5 million to support an initiative to better coordinate higher education health sciences programs across the state. More than $3.2 million of this gift will furnish and equip a new clinical skills lab for medical and nursing students; the balance will assist with the operations of the University of Nevada’s Health Sciences System.

Carolyn Yucha, dean of the School of Nursing, says that this facility will be shared by medical and nursing students across three institutions – the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada State College, and the University of Nevada Medical School.

“This is a collaborative effort between nursing students and medical students,” says Yucha. “It allows them to work together as students and understand one another’s roles before they get in the clinical setting.”

Yucha explains that the simulation lab provides unique opportunities for students that they wouldn’t get in the hospital. Using the mannequins allows students to have hands on work with a patient, practice and make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes in a safe learning environment. Then, when the students go to the hospitals, they already have many of these skills.

The facility is shared among the institutions, but may also be used by hospitals or emergency response teams in the future for their own practice or skills tests.

“It is our hope that this facility will serve as a resource for the entire health care system in the State of Nevada,” says Yucha. “Working together, we can have a much more sophisticated system than if any of us did it alone. This gift is a support of the collaborative effort, and it encourages all of us to work this way.”