Greenville Tech becomes Sim City with opening of high-tech learning center
Written by Written by Career Focus, Greenville Tech
Six years ago, as department head for Emergency Medical Technology at Greenville Tech, Mike Fisher began using the college’s first human patient simulator in the classroom. The simulators expanded learning opportunities, giving students the chance to practice procedures on an apparatus that could breathe and respond like a human, yet had the capacity to come back to life if someone accidentally allowed it to die.
Though the precursor to these simulators were the dummies of yesteryear, there’s nothing dumb about today’s technology. Human patient simulators breathe, cough, and even talk. The only thing they can’t do is walk. They’re realistic enough that students sometimes forget they’re not human, and that’s by design.
“The goal is to get students so involved in the simulation that they forget it’s not a real person,” Fisher says. “We actually had students go running out of the simulation one day, visibly upset because they thought they had killed their patient. The students were shaking, and their hands were sweaty.”
Simulators have drastically changed the quality of education provided in the allied health and nursing programs at Greenville Tech. “Up until 10 or 15 years ago, our practice in medicine has always been on real humans. Now we have simulators that respond to medications, treatments, and oxygen or a lack of it. We can program them to have any condition you can imagine, and the students have to deal with it, yet if they make a mistake, the patient isn’t harmed,” Fisher says.
Simulators have changed the direction of Fisher’s career as well. He went from using a simulator in the classroom to finding uses for simulators in all of Greenville Tech’s health and nursing programs. Eventually, he became an expert on the simulators, and colleges and universities across the country sought his advice on incorporating them into their own curriculums. At Greenville Tech, he was named director of the college’s new Simulation Center.
The center houses eight simulators and seven scenarios – a city street where a car accident has occurred, a scene inside a home, an emergency room, a standard hospital patient room, the labor and delivery area with neonatal resuscitation, an operating room, and a specialty room such as intensive care or pediatric intensive care. Here, the college’s 3,500 students in health-related programs will gain valuable practice in situations they might never be exposed to in standard clinical experiences.
Greenville Tech’s center is pioneering in its scope. While many colleges have nursing and paramedic students learning with human patient simulators, Fisher knows of no other college that is using the tool across all health programs. Radiologic technology students, for example, learn how to handle situations that might occur while giving patients x-rays. Dental students learn what to do if a patient should unexpectedly experience an allergic reaction, heart attack or seizure while in the dental chair.
Fisher credits vice president for education Steve Valand, formerly dean of Health Sciences at the college, with the vision to make a simulation center a reality. “This was his idea from 13 or 14 years ago,” Fisher says. “He wanted to create a simulation center where all the students could go and work on a simulator without endangering the lives of real patients.”
Today that vision is a reality, and the college not only has its own center, but also collaborates with the Greenville Hospital System and its simulation center to make optimum use of both facilities. Fisher looks to simulators to make a difference in the number of medical mistakes that claim lives each year.
“Studies have shown that almost 100,000 people die each year because of medical mistakes,” he says. “Simulators allow me to take students who have virtually no experience and give them exposure to situations they might not see for years. They’ll be better prepared when they go into the workplace than those of us who started out without this learning tool.”
In April 2004, the leaders of two of the South Carolina's largest healthcare systems and two of the state's research universities came together to announce the formation of Health Sciences South Carolina, a unique public-private partnership with a shared vision and a shared plan.
Lewis Blackman Endowed Chair
As a testament to his remarkable young life and as a commitment to advance the health and safety of all South Carolinians, the Medical University of South Carolina and Health Sciences South Carolina have dedicated an endowed chair in Clinical Effectiveness and Patient Safety to his memory. Read More
Collaborating Partners
On June 10, 2008 the Medical University of South Carolina and Healthcare Simulation SC partnered to open the second statewide collaborating healthcare simulation center. Click the picture to view the event photo album.
Six years ago, as department head for Emergency Medical Technology at Greenville Tech, Mike Fisher began using the college’s first human patient simulator in the classroom. The simulators expanded learning opportunities, giving students the chance to practice procedures on an apparatus that could breathe and respond like a human, yet had the capacity to come back to life if someone accidentally allowed it to die. 
As a testament to his remarkable young life and as a commitment to advance the health and safety of all South Carolinians, the Medical University of South Carolina and Health Sciences South Carolina have dedicated an endowed chair in Clinical Effectiveness and Patient Safety to his memory. 