ASHLAND, Ore. —The OHSU School of Nursing in Ashland is celebrating some big strides in the nursing field. It recently renovated its Simulation and Clinical Learning Center, on the SOU campus.
The $1.1 million facility is a collaboration between OHSU and SOU, that’s years in the making. The new high-tech simulation center will help get students prepared for real-world scenarios, in the medical field.
At first glance, this might look like a real hospital setting, but it’s actually OHSU’s newly renovated simulation and critical learning center. The state-of-the-art, nearly $100,000 square foot center at the OHSU Ashland Campus features mock health care rooms, with hospital beds, and life-like mannequins. Here, OHSU nursing students will learn important, life-saving skills, before they’re refined during rotations at local clinics and hospitals.
“We really are able to simulate what a patient for instance that has pneumonia really looks and sounds like so when the students get out to the hospital for example they have already had that experience,” said Heather Voss, Associate Professor with OHSU.
Students are recorded as they practice responding to various scenarios, like a heart attack or a patient with dementia. Then students and faculty evaluate how they performed. OHSU says the center is better preparing nurses to meet local health needs and also helping to grow Oregon’s Health Care workforce.
“Clinical judgment and clinical reasoning is how nurses think, it comes through a process of problem-solving, seeing the patient, seeing all the factors that are happening and this space provides a safe space for this to happen,” said Voss.
Chrystal Richard always enjoyed helping people and wanting to make health care more accessible and equitable for marginalized populations.
“I applied here at OHSU because of the great work that I saw other students doing and how their projects had the ability to impact the community,” said registered nurse, Crystal Richard.
As part of the OHSU school of nursing on the Ashland campus, she spent many long nights in the same building perfecting her craft. She says a newly renovated facility like this will give students the ability to echo the experiences of a registered nurse.
Today she is a registered nurse at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center, using the skills she learned every single day, at the Ashland Campus.
“Whether it’s giving an injection, or whether its practicing safe medications an aseptic technique and just interacting with patients and their family,” said Richard.
148 students are currently enrolled in the OHSU School of Nursing -Ashland campus, as of this year.
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