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Training Nurses With Virtual Veins
meganthom writes "UK Haptics is developing a virtual hand to help nurses learn how to draw blood and put in IVs in a realistic manner. Though plastic models are currently used, these do not give new nurses the 'feel' for how much pressure to apply to the needle, and they cannot alert the nurse about pain. The system currently under development, which uses haptics, would make the learning experience considerably more realistic, even telling the nurse when too much pressure was applied."
Maybe now my dentist can learn how to inject novocaine without stabbing me painfully 6 times :) (I just had $6k of dental work done... :( )
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It's simple, you just take a nice red Sharpie....
My wife had a plant safety class where they learned CPR from a paramedic who specializes in training. She had tattoed instructions on her arm how to do CPR, with an X on her wrist saying "Check here for pulse" and an X on her chest over her heart saying "Push here"
:)
People should come with operating instructions
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Last time I had blood taken, they let the trainee practice on my arm. She managed to spear through a major vein a few times, but never actually got in there. After making that vein completely useless, the head nurse came over and tried on the other arm. The trainee was still shaking, I'm not sure if she was nervous or just a shaker.
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I just gave blood yesterday and volunteered to be the guinea pig for a new trainee. I was her first human stick!
(She did great, but nevertheless, I would have felt better if she could have trained with one of these first.)
I swear, I looked like a total friggin' addict. I heard to wear sweaters to keep that crap covered up on my arms for like 2 years.
Apparently, citrus fruits make a good replacement for human veins. She spent a lot of time practicing on oranges, grapefruits and whatnot.
I hope, for all husbands and roommates everywhere, that these come out soon and that they're very very cheap.
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
I almost had the first post, but I was too busy using the virtual hand to give myself a virtual hand jo^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hback massage....
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My mother is a nurse. This will NEVER be as cheap, or as realistic, as having the students practice on each other, like she did in medical school.
As a retired paramedic who has stuck needles into literally thousands of veins, I can tell you that this kind of tool is of limited value. Even if they can exactly mimic the tactile sensations of a needle penetrating skin and then entering a vein, that's only part of the issue. A much bigger obstacle to be overcome is the social indoctrination that you don't go around stabbing people and making them bleed. Once most nursing/medical/paramedic students learn to just DO IT, their problems drop way off.
The traditional training method of having students practice on each other has a lot to reccommend it as a means of overcoming such reluctance. Anyway, a practice model would only get used in class a few times per student, and then they will be out assaulting real patients anyway. Increased training costs for limited benefit.
Prior to the operation, local anesthetic was of course applied on the nasal wall. Incidentally, this last procedure was also conducted with a damn long needle shoved straight up my nose and it hurt like hell each time they did it. Yes, each time they did it. A trainee tried to do it four times until his supervisor finally took over and applied it successfully.
Fortunately the actual puncturing of the nasal wall was unpleasant (lots of cracking and crunching sounds when the needle is pushed up your nose) but completely painless.
The owls are not what they seem
After the first 20 or so victims you eventually figured out how to avoid leaving that nasty black welt on the inside of their arms (which incidentally also gave the impression they were doing drugs). Do a few hundred or so (myself and 6 other fifth semester students had to process about 2,000 people, including admin aides and misc school workers) and you get pretty good at it. You also develop this uncanny skill at tying the rubber pressure band around people's arms so quickly that they're being pricked faster than they can yell "HOLY CRAP THAT HURTS"
The hardest part was drawing from overweight female students. No veins visible anywhere in the arm. Sometimes we had to draw from a leg or hand vein or weird shit like that. Still, it was fun (hey, I wasn't the one being punctured) and it beat termodynamics lab for sure. We eventually wrapped it up in a couple of weeks and got some school t-shirts for our troubles.
Oh, and here's the obligatory old fart "we had to walk barefoot in the snow uphill (both ways) at 5:00 AM every day to get to school and we liked it" and all that.
When I learned IV insertion we practiced on a loose-fitting concentric rubber tubes with liquid between them. The inner tube squirmed around about as much as a normal vein.
It's nice to see that they're getting more realistic.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
While I was in an ICU unit, the doc came by with some students. Since I have nice beefy arms and huge veins (the blood donation folks love me), the doc asked if I minded the students practicing on me.
Well, seeing that the trainees were young and cute, I said "sure" and let them stab me several times. Ok, they did pretty well, probably because their "patient" wasn't freaking out.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I have a mole on my arm that reads "STAB HERE FOR VEIN". Seriously. Nice and well placed, all they have to do is come close and they'll get a perfect stick.
So this nurse in Indiana screws it up. She stabs THRU the vein. Blood sprays all over the tube. She gets another tube, stabs, misses, sprays again.
after the 5th stick I'm pale white and about to pass out... I get up to leave, and this old, black nurse comes in and says "Honey you sit yourself right down, i'll get it and you won't even know".
I raise my arm to protest, she grabs it and sticks it in one smooth motion, so smooth I never felt the needle.
Man I love that woman.
The instructions are so context-dependant as to be misleading.
You could be half way through the CPR instructions and suddenly find the foreplay instructions and then you'll be arrested for both trying to revive and fondle accident victims.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I used to go to a technical school that offered various vocational training. There was my floor with the computer dept. It was 60% guys. A couple of floors up was the medical / nursing area. All girls.
They had to practice giving shots and such on live human beings. Once they were tired of stabbing each other they would wander down to the geek farm in search of brave young men willing to sacrifice their arms to advance medical science.(i.e. suckers) They figured that just because they were attrctive, dressed like nurses (even through they weren't) and the guys were all loney introverted dorks, they would be able to find lots of willing arms to practice on. They were right.
I fell for this a lot.
As a side note, being stabbed by a girl repeatedly doesn't win you her respect or admiration as much as you might think. Go figure.
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