Practice Makes Perfect

Ok, so, how do doctors and nurses pactice? Do they use classmates or family members or volunteers? How does this work? Can I sign up to be a practice patient? I am particularly curious as to how anesthesiologists practice knocking people out.

Any help would be great.

Mike

I have wondered the same thing.....

ACE

It seems like you "docs" should know that.

We trained on mannikins, professional patients and each other, sometimes with benefits 😁 😁 when outside the school setting.

Medical professionals learn the basics in school and train on mannequins (some are computerized to simulate life-functions such as breathing and heart rate). Once they are familiarized with how things operate, they start internships in a real clinical setting under supervision. Its rather vanilla.

However, I did hear of a story where a nursing student practiced urinary catheterizations on her boyfriend. So training on friends and family is a possibility I suppose.

Standardized patients are the optimum method for student doctors to practice on. See these older posts located here:

http://www.zity.biz/index.php?mx=forum;ox=display;topic=59157.0

I don't think anesthesiologists get much practice except with medical mannequins in simulation labs.

Usually standardized patients for most history-taking. Genital/rectal exams with volunteers or paid models these days.

Dr. Hawk has been banned, but for others interested after reading Mike's link above, I found that you can simply Google 'standardized patient' and find medical schools across the U.S. which have a program or search large medical center websites. Do know that interest isn't everything. They, like acting productions, look for specific men and women who can play roles or fill in gaps.

I have a 2 doctors & 3 nurses in my family, 50-60 years old. One nurse teaches at a community college. I asked them about practice. The doctors took physical diagnosis, practicing on each other for a semester, in conjunction with live patients in a large convalescent hospital, and then it was onto the hospital and clinics with live patients to learn on. They had no standardized patients. The nurses learned on live patients, with no practice on each other or dummies. These days there are dummies to try the procedures on the first couple times. But they all tell me there is no substitute for learning on live patients. The mantra was "See one. Do one. Teach one."

In my hospitalizations I've been at hospitals associated with nursing schools. Some of the nurses were doing the procedure the first time on me. I wasn't afraid, because the instructor was watching closely and making the student go through the steps in detail. Having a catheter inserted by a young female student with another woman watching was considerably more embarrassing than having one experienced person doing it, though.

My med school brought live professionals into class to perform on that were medically trained to guide us through various procedures. Beyond general physicals, we did prostate exams, OB/GYN exams, sigmoidoscopy, and more, all while being guided to push harder to the left, go deeper, that's the spot, etc. It was a little strange initially, but was incredibly valuable having the "patient" tell you what they were feeling. Things like venapuncture, IVs, and NG tubes were done on each other in the class. Urinary catheterizations were done on dummies that were not even close to the real thing. We did get to practice procedures on cadavers, where possible. Everything else was done in clinics and hospitals under the guidance of our preceptor who could have been an attending physician or a more senior resident.