Community Health

Spring 2016

Blog #3. NYSIM and Bellevue Hospital Centers, 462 First Avenue, New York, New York 10016. Wednesday, March 27, 2016, 8:00am – 12:00pm.

Before going to the NYSIM Center, I was somewhat apprehensive because I thought about all the times I had to work with mannequins for simulation in school, and how terrifying it was messing up in front of your classmates and the professor. However when we were told we were dealing with “live actors”, I also reflected on my previous experience during the associates nursing program working with actual people for simulation, which was essentially a fun learning experience. What I liked about the NYSIM experience was doing it with three other classmates, verses working by yourself or with just a partner. Working with more people left us with less room for mistakes, and had more minds thinking than just having one or two individuals thinking alone. This made thinking easier and less stressful because while one or two people were thinking of questions to ask, others were thinking of interventions to implement during this emergency situation. However, having a lot of people in a group can be just as bad as it was good. In one scenario, having a bigger group was not ideal because of the type of client we were dealing with. We lacked organization, and everyone was asking questions all at once and become flustered and ill prepared to help because the client was somewhat aggressive and overly demanding. As a team, we should have planned more appropriately and assigned different task to each member in the group to avoid not getting the job done and implementing the proper care. This proved to be our biggest weakness collaborating as a group.

My biggest weakness as an individual was assessing the situation without having in mind the background and history of the client. I was comfortable with the COPD, the asthma baby, and the cardiac clients; however, I was thrown off by the hypoglycemic client. I was too focused on her being hyperglycemic as the scenario stated that I paid less attention to the actual symptoms presented in order for us to implement care. This made me realize I need to sharpen my critical thinking skills as well as my “nurses common sense” awareness.

What I learned about myself was my ability to be the calm voice in chaos. I felt with the patients panicking about being out of oxygen and the mother being anxious about her baby, I was able to remain unruffled while repeatedly reminding the clients that they were safe and that help is on the way. In the meantime, my classmates were able to ask other appropriate questions about the client’s history and also assess the safeness of the environment.

I think it would be a great idea to include live actor simulation into the class curriculum for the future, however, I do not feel is it has to be done at the NYSIM center. I felt the professors played great actors for the scenarios, so having this done at the school can prove to be as good a learning experience as it was at Bellevue. It would also be some what “cool” to have group work where students come up with their own scenarios and play it out in front of the class, and have the class assess what illness or disease was being played out, and then working collectively as a group to give ideas on the plans and interventions that should be brought out in each case. This gives us autonomy as a class, and would make us less anxious about what to expect.

All in all, working and dealing with actual people makes a big difference than working with mannequins, and I believe it allows us to think better on our feet as if we were really in a community or hospital setting. Overall, I enjoyed the activity and the experience, and it allows us as students to feel more comfortable working with “real people”, helping us to gain the confidence we need for the working world.