TYLER, Texas — When COVID-19 hit everything changed, including how future nurses would gain hands-on experience.
Typically, nursing students worked in clinical settings such as hospitals to learn how to provide proper care to patients. Colleen Marzilla, the concurrent program director and grant director for the University of Tyler at Texas Nursing School says the pandemic presented a problem, that thankfully the school had a solution for.
"With clinical sites having to switch gears and be so concerned about their staff and their staffing inundated with COVID-19 patients, it was really a challenge with how are we going to continue to have students in the clinical setting?" Marzilla said. "Simulation is something that's supported in the evidence. It's just an effective way to teach nursing students."
Nursing students have been able to practice patient care and problem solving through the use of mannequins in the school's simulated hospital. However, Marzilla says the technology for simulation updates frequently and while they have a few mannequins, they can be costly to purchase.
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board started a grant program "to help address the state’s nursing shortage." UT Tyler received the full $200,000 grant, which Marzilla explains will be used to expand the simulation program for multiple UT campuses.
"We have a state of the art simulation hospital at all of the UT Tyler campuses, that's Tyler, Longview and Palestine," she said. "The three components of our grant: having an additional faculty member that will be hospital simulation operator, having a new mannequin that we desperately need and getting the training, which is really going to just make the simulations that we are doing so much more impactful for students."
The nursing school's current mannequins range in levels from low fidelity to high, which help students with basic skills and problem-solving on the spot.
"We have low fidelity mannequins that are basically like a doll," Marzilla said. "They just kind of lay in bed and a nursing student will practice basic skills on them."
The new one will have high fidelity programming to help UT Tyler's Longview Nursing Center students. A vital tool to enhance future nurses' responses to childbirth as East Texas has one of the highest infant mortality rates in Texas.
"That high fidelity mannequin is like they are taking care of a real patient from all of the complex bodily functions that that mannequin is able to simulate," she explained. "A simulation mannequin will actually be able to simulate a birth, which is really exciting for students to be able to see that experience."
The school plans to have the new faculty member, who will operate the simulation hospital, hired before January. Marzelli says she's unsure when the new mannequin will arrive, but the simulation training to update faculty on the latest will happen before the spring.