Not human, but almost
‘Hal’ helps ease nursing students’ fears
By Joi Harris
Staff Reporter

Mary Beth Walker, the learning center director, stood by as Hal’s breathing continued to get shallow, and his heart started beating faster. As his blood pressure dropped, his heart developed a life threatening rhythm. Within five minutes, all of Hal’s life-functions ceased. He was clinically dead.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that it was part of a controlled simulation conducted by Walker to demonstrate the capabilities of the $190,000 simulator purchased by the Harris School of Nursing last summer.

Because there is little room for error in the medical field, faculty and staff members of the Harris School of Nursing said the department has purchased the sixth version Human Patient Simulator, nicknamed “Hal,” in order to relieve the amount of pressure and fear students experience as part of their job, before they actually come in contact with a real person.

“We want to make the student experience to be on such a high level that the amount of fear they experience is much less by the time they actually come in contact with a living patient,” Walker said. “We can make the situation intense enough to make virtual reality real.”

The HPS, which is manufactured by Medical Education Technologies, Inc., is a computer-driven, full-sized mannequin that blinks, speaks and breathes. According to the company’s Web site, the HPS mirrors human responses to such procedures as CPR, intravenous medication, ventilation and catheterization.

The Harris School of Nursing is the second school in Fort Worth to purchase an HPS. John Uselding, director of the simulator lab at Texas Wesleyan University, said his department purchased an earlier model in 1999.

Uselding said students in Wesleyan’s nurse anesthesia program use the department’s simulator to practice administering anesthetics to patients.

Since 1999, Uselding said the students who have used the simulator have received favorable comments from their clinical coordinators.

Mike Sadler, the clinical coordinator at John Peter Smith Hospital, said that students who have had experience using simulators are able to handle the “finer points” of their job.

“Because certain aspects of the nursing field is driven a lot by technique, prior experience will enable students to do a better job of multitasking, Sadler said.

Brooks Zitzmann, a junior nursing major, is in her first year of clinicals. She said Hal is a better bridge between the lab and real life because it is technologically a step above the type of mannequins she’s used in the past.

“It’s a great tool for us to practice patient care and study the physiological response to care without real life implications,” Zitzmann said.

Hal currently resides on a $3,000 stretcher donated by Harris Methodist Southwest Hospital. Walker said the nursing hospital is seeking more donations from Tarrant County hospitals.