Human simulator may help future veterinarians save animal lives

Professional training through the use of simulators that imitate real-life situations has become a way of life in everything from emergency medicine to space flight. Now, thanks to a new anesthesia training program at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, animal care may be next.

This year’s veterinary graduates are the first in the country to have studied anesthesia using a Human Patient Simulator developed as a teaching tool by UF physicians in the 1980s. Educators feel the experience will make a huge difference in enhancing students’ confidence in handling emergency situations, as well as their overall skills in administering anesthesia to animals.

David Woodham, who graduated from the UF veterinary college May 29, completed two anesthesia rotations during which he worked with the patient simulator.

“You can stop and talk about why pressures are dropping,” he said. “Also, if it’s a bad scenario, you’re not having to deal with someone’s actual pet. That definitely takes the pressure off.”

Jan Ilkiw, a professor and associate dean of academic programs at the University of California-Davis’ School of Veterinary Medicine, said Florida’s veterinary school was the first in the country to offer such a program.

“They’re the only ones with a publication about the human simulator’s use in veterinary education,” Ilkiw said.

In 2002, the Journal of Veterinary Medical Education published a UF study in which 90 students took turns being the “patient’s” clinician as real-life scenarios were played out on the simulator. The students induced and maintained anesthesia on their patient — a full-sized adult mannequin nicknamed Stan, for “standard man” — and monitored vital signs. This time, the simulator represented an animal patient. Several critical events were presented for the students to diagnose and treat.

The study’s authors, faculty members from the colleges of Veterinary Medicine and Medicine, included Dr. Jerome Modell, Shauna Cantwell, John Hardcastle, Sheilah Robertson, and Luisito Pablo.

“We concluded that the Human Patient Simulator was a valuable learning tool for students of veterinary medicine,” said Cantwell, an assistant professor of anesthesia at the veterinary college who holds a joint appointment in the College of Medicine. Cantwell has since taken the simulator to professional meetings, including the World Congress of Veterinary Anesthesia in Orlando last October, to demonstrate its use to a group including veterinarians, students and veterinary technicians.

“It was exciting for students to work with, made them deal with real-life scenarios, permitted them to learn without subjecting live patients to complications and enabled them to retrace their steps when their therapy did not correct the simulated patient’s problems,” Cantwell said.

Last year, UF’s veterinary school began requiring that students be exposed to the simulator as part of their education. Students in the clinical training phase of their curriculum travel from UF’s Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital across the street to UF’s McKnight Brain Institute, where they spend two hours working with the simulator as part of a two-week rotation in anesthesia. Students who desire additional training in anesthesia are able to sign up for another rotation before graduation.

Educators say simulations seem real because the patient is lifelike, and the anesthetic equipment is standard for many hospitals. The simulator uses a computer program that controls physiologic parameters, a bar-coded intravenous injection site and a urinary catheter. Connected to a complete clinical anesthesia machine as well as to a mechanical ventilator, the system can simulate blood and arterial pressure, temperature, cardiac output and respiratory gases. An instructor controls which diseases or symptoms are presented to the student. The simulator then adjusts the patient’s response to treatment automatically.

“In school during their regular curriculum students don’t have the chance to be the primary caregivers in an emergency situation, making their own decisions and implementing them,” Cantwell said. “So when they are faced in practice with an emergency, not only will they have to evaluate and treat the patient in an appropriate time frame, they’ll have to face any confidence issues they might have.”