Cosmo Kramer and Mickey Abbott won”™t be there, but New York Medical College students will test their skills on actors at the school”™s new Clinical Skills and Disaster Medicine Training Center.
The newly renovated 21,000-square-foot LEED-certified silver building on Dana Road in Valhalla features an auditorium, 20 patient exam rooms and teaching tools the school hopes will help students improve their clinical skills in a realistic environment. The improvements cost approximately $17 million, sourced from a combination of philanthropic, institutional and New York state grant funds.
“It”™s essentially a safe place to practice skills and get feedback before they have to go out and do those skills on a real person in a real environment,” said David Patterson, director of clinical skills at the center. “We”™re going to use it for everything from computer-based exams for the students to small group activities to large group meetings and functions for the school, as well as didactic portions of continuing education units.”
Inside the facility, the exam rooms are no different than exam rooms at nearly every medical facility ”“ except that each has two closed-circuit cameras, so instructors can monitor and evaluate the students”™ interactions with what the instructors call “standardized patients.”
Standardized patients are the trained actors (yes, actors ”“ according to Patterson, some are even card-carrying members of the Screen Actors Guild) who portray various symptoms while being examined by students. Like medical students, they start out in basic exercises before being put into more complex hypothetical situations.
“We”™ve experimented with some different novel ways of using them,” said Dr. Michael Reilly, who is the director of disaster medicine at the center. “In May, we brought 20 standardized patients up to Dutchess County to participate in a full-scale exercise about a pandemic. It added a lot more realism to have an actor portraying someone who is ill rather than someone with an index card saying, ”˜This is what”™s wrong with me.”™ It makes the simulation that we run more valuable and more credible.”
In addition to the standardized patients, the facility has a collection of around 60 mannequins that can be used to simulate patients for a wide variety of different procedures and hypothetical situations. New York Medical College has about 800 students in its M.D. program, and all will come through the Clinical Skills and Disaster Medicine Training Center for practical experience.
“All the OB clerkship students will be coming here to learn how to deliver babies,” Patterson said. “Normal deliveries, breech deliveries, shoulder dystocia, all of those things, we”™re going to give them practice with mannequins before they”™re actually out doing those things.”
Perhaps the most interesting of the mannequins are the three SimMan 3G mannequins, manufactured by Laerdal in Norway. The mannequins have a four-hour battery, so they can be brought out of the facility for training in different environments and can simulate numerous human functions such as heartbeat, sweating and breathing. Instructors can control the mannequin via computer and make it speak with the instructor”™s voice either live or by pre-recording.
“We have modules for each of these mannequins to teach nuclear, biological and chemical agent exposure,” Reilly said. “So we”™re able to change some components and add features that let us simulate exposures to more severe forms of pathology.”
While the medical college and Center for Disaster Medicine will be the primary users, officials said they also hope to see local residency programs, community members and continuing education classes use the facility. In a few months, BioInc@NYMC, a biotechnology business incubator, will open in a segment of the building that will offer lab and office space to biotech startups.
Patterson said he is excited about the variety of pedagogical tools the school now has to teach students good clinical techniques.
“That can be the standardized patient for learning communications skills, on a mannequin it can be learning how to put in an IV line, how to run a code, whatever it might be, there”™s a long list of skills that can be learned here in a safe environment for the students.”
