January 2023 - SEM Trainers

Benefits of Medical Manikins in Obstetrics & Gynecology Residency Training

Around 46% of all maternal deaths and 40% of neonatal deaths happen during labor or within the first 24 hours after birth.

Manikins and simulators help build relevant obstetric and gynecological skills that prepare and equip them with the skills to handle obstetric emergencies, and endoscopic and laparoscopic surgeries like hysterectomy, salpingectomy, oophorectomy, and access to the abdomen. Simulation gives them a platform to engage in hands-on practice for standard delivery, postpartum hemorrhages, massive blood transfusion, fetal malpresentation, vaginal hysterectomies, amniotic fluid emboli, etonogestrel implant insertions, shoulder dystocias, among others, improving the quality of care available to people.

The benefits of incorporating medical manikins in obstetrics and gynecology residency training are paramount and extensive, making it an indispensable tool in the field.

Benefits of Medical Manikins in Obstetrics and Gynecology Residency Training

1. Experience

Only 3.6% of obstetrics and gynecology residents feel confident in their ability to perform robotic surgery without further training. This lack of confidence may be attributed to a lack of opportunities to gain that experience. For example, all emergency and life-threatening cases are assigned to experts, leaving others to watch or assist, depriving them of the potential hands-on experience. Medical manikins and simulators solve that problem as they provide the opportunity for hands-on experience in a safe, controlled environment and for a wide range of scenarios.

2. Accessibility

Given the sensitivity of obstetrics and gynecology, simulation can be an effective tool in letting students practice difficult skills and procedures. Medical manikins and simulators are also able to create situations where students can practice procedures that are hard to reproduce otherwise, need repeated practice, or contain high-fidelity scenarios. And all this is made possible without posing any risk, inconvenience, or discomfort to real patients.

3. Transitional

Manikins and simulators bridge the gap between theory and practical as they prepare learners for the real thing. Although these aren’t real patients or real situations, that doesn’t make it ineffective. When a learner enters such a carefully planned simulation scenario with manikins, simulators, actors, and stories, it gets real very, very fast. The manikins also look and respond like real patients. Using manikins for training these obstetric and gynecological skills is therefore pivotal in making sure students don’t enter the working field feeling unprepared or unequipped to deal with the exigencies of the real hospital setting.

4. Skill-building

Through repeated hands-on practice, manikins and simulators are able to build diverse skills in learners- skills that cannot all be cultivated as well through theoretical teaching paradigms alone. In addition to specific clinical skills, it is effective at building interprofessional communication skills, teamwork skills, decision-making skills, and emotional skills that allow them to effectively communicate with patients or distressed family members. In fact, simulation can elevate the skill levels of first and second-year residents to that of third and fourth-year residents. Additionally, it can also be used to teach new skills to experienced professionals.

5. Knowledge Acquisition and Retention

Repeated practice is also great at cementing the fundamentals into the learners’ minds. Not only do they understand concepts better and in more detail, but they also retain the learned information for longer, studies show.

6. Encourages Improvement

Through simulation and its ability to provide real-time feedback, medical manikins are able to identify which skills need more work for each individual learner, leaving no stone unturned. Additionally, the simulation may also identify facility organizational and equipment issues.

7. Better Maternal-Fetal Outcomes

Since manikins and simulators are able to allow learners the ability to practice without the consequences of making mistakes, it gives them the freedom to explore. Through this, it is able to teach in a way that is unsurpassed. This translates to knowledgeable students that graduate into professionals who know what they are doing. And ultimately, this improves maternal-fetal outcomes as it helps these professionals take crucial decisions at the right time.

Through simulation, real-time feedback, assessment, and debriefing, medical manikins, and simulators can achieve new heights for obstetrics and gynecology training and form an integral part of the training of medical residents.

How Medical Manikins are Preparing Healthcare Professionals for High-Stress Emergency Situations?

Saving lives is challenging enough without the added pressure of emergency. But day and night, doctors and nurses have to tend to those in the emergency ward.

When you are in a position to save a life, a lot is at stake and you need to do the right thing at the right time. But in a high-stress situation like that, it can be easy to overlook certain details and make a wrong decision. For example, when a patient loses consciousness, one may start delivering chest compressions without checking the vitals first.

Simulation can Provide Unmatched Exposure in Emergency Situation

Theory alone does not suffice to make these students capable enough to deal with whatever emergency situation comes along. But with the state-of-the-art manikins and simulators available today, instructors are able to set up hyper-realistic emergency scenarios in real-time to test and help students build both clinical and communication/emotional skills. With these high-tech medical manikins, they are able to practice in a realistic learning environment.

1. Medical Manikins for a Variety of Emergency Scenarios

It is especially difficult to prepare students for handling emergencies because they cannot be assigned to an actual emergency situation without risking patient lives. But ranging from low-fidelity to high-fidelity and available for specific skills as well, these manikins are able to mimic any medical emergency. Whether it’s cardiac arrest, an epileptic seizure, a patient going into shock, or a neonatal complication that can endanger the lives of the mother and the baby, simulating an emergency situation can equip learners with the tools to handle it correctly. And in addition to making training accessible, simulation can also make it cost-effective.

2. Medical Manikins for Mass Casualties

An emergency may also present itself in the dozens or the hundreds. For example, a concert bombing or an airport disaster may require medical personnel to make multiple critical decisions while also taking triage to save as many lives as they can. In such a scenario, one wrong decision can lead to a series of bad decisions, and cost many lives. Simulation can also help prepare students for disasters with such massive casualties so they can get to save lives without wasting precious time in being overwhelmed and making mistakes. It can also build the competence to treat a large number of people with limited supplies.

Simulation can Help Build a Variety of Skills that Come in Handy During an Emergency

When seeing a patient, a verbal assessment can make the process easier as they tell you what’s wrong or what happened. But this is not always possible in an emergency situation. The patient may be unconscious or unable to speak. Then, you are left reliant on all your senses. By paying attention to what you see, smell, or touch can help you figure out what’s wrong.

Manikins are perfect at building these skills in a learner as they do respond realistically and are lifelike, but may require the learner to use all the information available to them to be able to figure out what’s going on. Through this kind of simulation, they can improve at skills like drug selection, dosage adjustment, timing of administration, monitoring for adverse effects, reduction of waste by interrupting an incorrect order processed in the pharmacy, rounding of doses to the nearest vial size, and reuse of medications.

The goal is to make it feel as real as possible. You would think that students might not take it as seriously since it’s just manikins, but even though it’s all simulated, to a learner, it feels like they are working with a real person with a heartbeat, breathing sounds, and a pulse.

Simulation training has, over the years, been used across medical disciplines to improve skills and instill confidence, allowing students to learn via hands-on experience. Simulation is not only able to teach crucial skills, but also helps reinforce those skills when paired with a lecture-based teaching paradigm. Its effectiveness has been studied year after year, and has cemented it as an indispensable teaching tool for preparing medical personnel to handle emergencies. After all, it can be a matter of life and death.