A HOSPITAL WITH NO REAL PATIENTS
Next spring, a large teaching hospital in the north of the country will open a new emergency department, which is expected to be one of the busiest in the region. To make sure that its future staff are ready, the hospital has spent the past two years running an unusual training program. Every week, groups of young doctors and nurses spend whole days treating patients who cough, bleed and complain of pain – yet not one of these patients is a real person.(lines 1–5)
The training takes place in the Practice Ward, an exact copy of a hospital department, built on the top floor of the medical school. It has eight beds, a small operating room and the same machines that the new department will use. Its "patients" are life-size robots, controlled by instructors who sit in the next room behind a window that looks like a mirror. According to the program's director, Dr. Samuel Okafor, mistakes are a normal part of learning, but a mistake made on a real person can cost a life. That is why the hospital has decided that no trainee will treat a real patient before spending at least forty hours in the ward. "Here, they can get something wrong, see what happens and try again," he says. "And nobody gets hurt."(lines 6–13)
Life in the ward follows strict rules, just as it would in a real emergency department. Trainees have to arrive at seven in the morning, wear full uniforms and hand in their phones at the door. Every single action, from checking a patient's pulse to giving medicine, must be written on a chart within five minutes. To help the instructors judge their work more fairly, every uniform also carries a smart badge, which records where each trainee moves and how long he or she spends at each bed. At the end of the day, the information from the badges appears on a large screen, and each group discusses what went well and what could have been done faster. For many trainees, this daily review is the most useful part of the program.(lines 14–21)
Every so often, the instructors create a sudden emergency without any warning. This shows the trainees how quickly a calm situation can turn dangerous. On one day a robot may stop breathing; on another, the lights may go out in the middle of an operation. The instructors also want to find out how well each team shares information when everyone is under pressure. Trainees often describe these moments as exhausting, but they say they are worth it. As one young nurse put it, "When my first real emergency came, I felt that I had already been there."(lines 22–27)