ROCKFORD—On May 5, St. Anthony College of Nursing held an official ribbon cutting for two new simulation labs in the lower level of the Guilford Square campus on Featherstone Road.

The obstetrics (OB) lab features mannequins of a baby and of a pregnant woman. Students can practice assessments and treatments when, for example, the “baby” turns blue or the “woman” has complications in her “pregnancy.”

Some of that programming is built in, while other scenarios originate with simulation lab coordinator, Dawn Mosher, MS, RN, who watches the action from another room and controls the mannequin via a tablet device. Mosher also can provide the voice of the adult female mannequin to add to the realistic effect.

“We try to (present) real life situations,” Mosher explains. Nurses may never encounter some rare diseases, but “no matter where (nurses) work, they are going to have a patient with pneumonia,” she says.

Real world circumstances are experienced also in the other lab, which is designed as a living room and kitchen area to help train future community health nurses.

In this lab setting, students and staff role-play from scripts that are designed to reflect what nurses may face when they visit a home to do a professional assessment and patient evaluation. One student plays a community health nurse, working without a script.

From fake bugs to an electric hair dryer in the kitchen sink, students learn to identify potential health hazards as well as assess the health and wellbeing of the patient.

Other lessons being learned include how to communicate with family members if, for example, the family speaks little English, and the need to observe how family members interact with each other.

Student observers and participants alike learn from the labs, says Mosher. Non-participants watch the simulations from a next-door conference room. If a large group of students are observing one of the labs, the scenario can be projected upstairs to a hospital auditorium.

The simulations also can be recorded and then viewed and analyzed at a later time.

The new simulation labs join a long-existing lab across the hall that is filled with mannequins for students to practice many of the practical things that nurses often do, developing such skills as giving shots or insert catheters before they work on real patients.

“I love them,” Mosher says of the labs. “The students really respond to them.”

And the lessons, she adds, really sink in.

The new labs were funded in part with proceeds from the 2015 OSF Foundation’s annual Pink Ball.