Nursing for dummies: Lifelike mannequins help students sharpen their patient care skills

Nursing for dummies
Lifelike mannequins help students sharpen their patient care skills

By José Alaniz
October 30, 2000
Photo: Medical Plastics Laboratory Inc.

		High-tech mannequins manufactured by Medical Plastics Laboratory Inc. accurately simulate the human body and give students the opportunity to practice procedures.
Students can insert IV lines, perform intubations, tracheotomies and the Heimlich maneuver, treat wounds, detect arrhythmic heartbeats, and listen to bowel sounds using MPL models.


	You've read the article. Now tell us what you think. Related site Medical Plastics Laboratory Inc. News Report On Medical Errors and Mannequins For Practice American Society of Anesthesiologists Article on Patient Simulators

Work as a nurse long enough, and you’re bound to hear it from somebody, if you haven’t lived through it yourself: the "sticking an orange" story.

"I was in nursing school 10 years ago, and we didn’t really have anything to regularly practice injections on," Susan Snoddy, LVN, said. "So we’d stick an orange. Obviously, it wasn’t very realistic, and when it came time to stick a needle into a real patient, I was really nervous. My instructor had to guide my hand into the patient’s arm."

To sum up: Orange – bad substitute for patient. Patient – too real for first-timer mistakes.

Between these two extremes lies the high-tech mannequin – the ultimate teaching tool. This is what Snoddy, an account executive with Gatesville, Texas-based Medical Plastics Laboratory Inc. (MPL), a leading mannequin manufacturer, communicates in her sales pitches to nursing schools, paramedics and others involved in teaching medical care to students – who, after all, shouldn’t be resorting to fruit or their imaginations to learn vital skills.

"I was scared to death when I had to insert a nasal gastric tube into an MS patient for the first time," Snoddy said. "But today, nurses I meet love the mannequins because you can train over and over and learn the feel of the skill. You get the best-trained nurses that way, because you can be book smart and pass the exams, but you still need that hands-on training."

The 50-year-old MPL’s product line has no shortage of models to practice on. You can insert IV lines; perform intubations, tracheotomies and the Heimlich maneuver; treat wounds; detect arrhythmic heartbeats; even listen to bowel sounds. The Skele-Torso simulates a human body – down to the ligaments and organs held together with Velcro – more accurately than any other model in history.

Next year, MPL will release a Universal Patient Simulator, a software-driven, programmable mannequin that can duplicate different medical situations, all pulses and physiological data, and log every procedure done – and not done – on it during a training session.

MPL mannequins, modeled from molds of human cadavers, even have fingerprints. Not since Pygmalion have humans come this close to reproducing the human body in all its complexity.

Founded in 1949 by two doctors and a dentist frustrated by the lack of realistic models, MPL has grown to become the second-largest employer in Gatesville, a town of 12,000 residents near Waco. The company, along with a handful of other firms in Denmark, the United States and Germany, now vies for the $100 million to $150 million market in medical mannequins.

To win customers in this game, MPL sales reps said, you need three things: realism, realism, realism. "The No.1 compliment we get from nurses is that it’s the most realistic product on the market," said Rosie Patterson, vice president for sales and marketing.

"These days the mannequins compare very favorably with human beings," said Dorothy Collins, MSN, RN, department chair of the Vocational Nursing School at Houston Community College.

"The skin feels like skin. Back in the mid-’60s, when I went to nursing school, you could buy a doll and it would have had the same [external] features as our mannequins. They had no eye-blink reflex, one facial expression, no blood irrigation [ability to receive and expel "blood"], no nasal gastric openings. They were merely hard statues."

With 300 students spread among three laboratories, the school uses about 25 high-tech mannequins for teaching everything from IV skills to reading vital signs. The models also help promote more intangible but crucial interpersonal skills.

"We have to remind the students to be more gentle with them," Collins said. "The mannequins aren’t sensitive to touch, so they won’t complain if a student yanks on them. But of course a live patient will. So we tell them to keep in mind how to position the patient correctly, keep a straight alignment and be aware of the patient’s sensitivity. How gentle you are does make a difference in the real world. It’s good to start learning that on mannequins."

Students even introduce themselves to the "patient," and give the mannequins names like Harrison Ford or Denzel Washington, Snoddy said.

The mannequin’s marginal status between life and death also makes it well-suited for other tasks, like postmortem care, Collins said.

"That’s when a student really understands the mannequin as more or less what it is: a dead body. They correct its body position, remove any medical devices, wash it for hygiene and prepare documentation. A mannequin is perfect for those skills."

Reality, of course, doesn’t always come cheap. MPL’s prices range from about $5,500 for a Complete Care Doll, used at many nursing schools, to about $30,000 for the new computerized patient simulator. Some models of separate body parts go for as low as $1,000, but are fully upgradeable "as funds come in," Patterson said.

The company has recently followed a more multiracial, multigender trend. For example, this year it released a mannequin with interchangeable genitalia and female breasts.

All this devotion to verisimilitude in teaching tools may bring closer the day when nursing students will stick only one thing into oranges: their teeth.