Realistic training for nurses of the future

THE upgraded nurse training and simulation ward at Australian Catholic University’s Aquinas Campus officially opened last week.

Designed to look and operate as a hospital would, the classroom has 16 beds, a separate suite with its own observation and control room, sterile, drug, and pan rooms, and state-of-the-art learning equipment, including interactive mannequins.

Funded by $1.9 million from the State Government, ACU vice-chancellor and president Professor Zlatko Skrbis said the facility can educate twice as many pre-clinical nurses than before.

“This funding helps our nursing and paramedicine students develop their skills further, becoming even more job-ready to meet the growing demands across the healthcare industry in our region and beyond,” he said.

“ACU is Australia’s largest educator of nurses. At a time when the importance of our frontline health workforce has been so strongly highlighted, we remain committed to meeting the growing demand for nurses, paramedics, and other healthcare workers, especially to communities throughout regional Victoria.”

Fourth-year nursing and paramedicine student Sherlyn Hii has been learning on the ward since it became operational at the end of 2021.

“As someone who’s been out in industry, has done a lot of placement, and is already partly working at the local hospital, all of the equipment in the simulation ward is pretty close to the quality of equipment you’d have in a well-furbished and busy medical or surgical ward, or even an ICU, in terms of monitoring,” she said.

“I find the mannequins are really realistic and it’s very easy to suspend your disbelief when you’re in a simulation and get into a clinical mindset.

“There’s an operator and supervisor in the control room who can make [the mannequin] talk to us, change her heart rate, oxygen saturations, the noises that she makes, and it feels like you’re interacting with a real person, rather than a mannequin.”

At the opening event, Member for Wendouree Juliana Addison celebrated nurses’ “heroic” everyday work, and those willing to step into the industry into the future.

“We’re strengthening the local workforce even more by providing world-class training opportunities to the next generation of healthcare experts,” she said.