In the Center for Clinical Simulation’s labor and delivery room, a team of students supervised by Dr. Lisa Hanson, associate professor and co-founder of Marquette’s Nurse-midwifery Program (right), participates in a simulated delivery scenario with the center’s birthing mannequin, Noelle. Tamiah McCoy, Nurs ’13 (left), and Tanya Belanger, Grad ’13 (middle), attend individually to mother and child.
done this before. I did exactly what I did during the simulation exercise, and I even taught the parents how to take care of the wound at home,” she says. The partnership that helped make the simulation center possible is a win for all parties. Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare is guaranteed 200 hours of use of the new simulation center each year for ongoing training of its nurses and other clinical care providers, providing considerable cost savings compared with buildng its own facility. Wheaton’s health care providers will receive interdisciplinary team training and state-of-the-science education in key clinical priorities, with the goal of reducing clinical errors and increasing patient safety. “More than 75 years ago, Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare and Marquette collaborated on a nursing program that ushered in the era of modern nursing in Milwaukee. This new Center for Clinical Simulation builds on this partnership and allows us to better prepare future nurses and our own staff to provide the highest-quality and safest care to patients,” explains Dr. Brenda Bowers, R.N., senior vice president of organizational change and leadership performance for Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare. For Cottini, the value of simulation now and for the future of the college is summed up in a single word: confidence.
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“Through simulation and a focus on being patient-centered, Marquette nurses are taught the confidence to do whatever needs to be done to give our patients the best possible care,” she says. The faculty responsible for the instruction of Cottini and her fellow classmates are more confident, too, about the future nurses they are training. “Simulation helps give context to the skills students are learning in their courses. First they learn about the skill, and then they practice it in a safe simulated environment before being expected to perform that skill on patients in a clinical environment,” Paquette says. In Callahan’s opinion, today’s nursing graduates enter environments in which patients are sicker than ever, often in busy, complex health care settings. She and Marquette’s nursing faculty have made it their mission to ensure that the college is preparing students to handle these changing trends and challenges within the health care system. “If, when our students first set foot in a clinical environment, they are more confident and prepared because of simulation, then we can say our vision for reimagining nursing education has been successful,” she says. ✤