A new world awakens in anesthesia

by Shawn Ryan

Eric Jones has worn a virtual reality headset to immerse himself in the simulated world of building solar systems.

"That was cool. Super cool," he says.

But he'd never worn a virtual headset as a nurse anesthetist student in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga School of Nursing. It was cool, too, but working in a virtual operating room brought everything down to earth.

"It was more realistic and functional. It certainly felt like a good way to get more familiar with the room and the equipment," says Jones, a registered nurse who is in training to be certified as a nurse anesthetist.

Produced by Prodigy Anesthesia in Huntsville, Alabama, the Simvana Anesthesia virtual reality training simulator can lead students step-by-step through an operation, from opening the operating room door to checking the anesthesizing machine's operations before and during surgery, to dealing with emergency situations if necessary.

"You are just immersed. I did it, too. You feel like you're in another place, but you have to be," says Rachel Nall, a clinical assistant professor in the School of Nursing and a certified registered nurse anesthetist who works at Erlanger Hospital.

The School of Nursing has a simulation lab with mannequins and hands-on equipment for training nurse anesthetists, but when the lab is booked up, the virtual program can be used to practice certain procedures, Nall says.

With COVID taking away the ability to be in actual hospitals for some hands-on clinical experience, the Simvana machine also can make up some of that experience, she says.

Last year, our students weren't able to get in the actual ORs for our clinical hours because the hospital was so locked down," she says. "To have something like this virtual reality experience, where they could see everything as much as they could in the hospital, it's responsive in that way. It's a more COVID-friendly approach."

Peter Stallo, president of Prodigy Anesthesia, teaches Laura Tyndall, assistant program director of the nurse anesthesia program within the School of Nursing, how to use the Simvana Anesthesia virtual reality training simulator.

The UTC School of Nursing is one of two—the University of Alabama at Birmingham is the other—helping Prodigy refine the Simvana simulator before it goes into full commercial production, says Peter Stallo, president of Prodigy Anesthesia.

"When you're developing something you're so familiar with it, you don't recognize the problems that other people would have. Being able to see students go through it, figure out what issues they had that we never anticipated, allowed us to go back and reiterate several components of the design, and we're doing that now. It's been a tremendous help getting the feedback from the students and the faculty," says Stallo, who worked as a nurse anesthetist in Birmingham for 10 years prior to developing the Simvana simulator.

Working with Prodigy as it perfects the simulator is a win-win, Nall says. As the company learns, so do the students.

"Whenever Prodigy has a new simulation, and they want to try it out, we're going to have the technology here. So the students can use that," she says.

Knowing the ins and outs of the anesthesia instruments is a major category on the national certification exam, and the simulator provides those lessons, too. For instance, in a real operating room, the anesthetist performs a machine check before the procedure to make sure everything is working correctly. The simulator will tell a student whether an instrument is working properly and also has pop-up boxes that give detailed information about the instrument, how it works, what it does and more, Nall says.

"There's a very educational component to that," she explains. The simulator will be ready for students when spring semester begins in January and available during the School of Nursing's regular business hours, another plus for students, Nall says.

"Students today want to engage in structured and non-structured environments. So to have the ability to say, 'Hey, we're going to be here from nine to five,' then come and do it in their time and pace. That's really how the students seem to prefer to learn. So I feel like it's very responsive to them and their learning needs."