ESCANABA, Mich. (WZMQ) – On Friday, local nurses, hospital staff, healthcare educators, and other professionals visited Escanaba to develop their training skills.
Bay College hosted a Mini SUN Workshop, with SUN standing for Simulator User Network.
“We want to spread awareness to the importance of simulation in healthcare,” said Bay College Clinical and Simulation Coordinator Sara Torvinen, “how that can help when you’re in nursing school, preparing nurses with skills, clinical judgment, critical thinking, teamwork, communication, all these components that go into being a nurse.”
By using high-fidelity mannequins to run those simulations, students and professionals get hands-on experience with real-world situations.
“That way they know how to react when they do see it in real life,” Torvinen explained. “We can do codes and births. Our goal today is to take that simulation component and show people how they can kind of tailor it to their department.”
For most of the workshop participants, their department would be a hospital or classroom. However, some work in fields outside of healthcare, like corrections.
“It gives them that ability to do those skills and get that confidence down and that competence level to the point where they feel comfortable going into the field and doing it on live patients,” said Torvinen.
According to Torvinen, simulations are less common in rural areas like the U.P. than they are in more urban communities. That’s why Bay College is working to bring this resource to the local professionals and students who need it.
“We do have to wear quite a few different hats in the healthcare realm around here, and I think it’s incredibly important to build that awareness up here that it is something that we can utilize,” Torvinen said. “Our eventual goal would be to be a hub for these community hospitals around this area. They can come on in, and we can utilize our simulation for their yearly trainings that are mandated by the state.”
She says simulations are more than an academic project or standard workplace training. Rather, they are firsthand learning opportunities that lead to optimal outcomes for real patients.
“We can mitigate the preventable errors in a simulation realm, and it just improves patient safety overall,” said Torvinen.
To learn about healthcare programs offered at Bay College, visit baycollege.edu.
