Training Magazine - October 2007 - (Page 40) Games &Simulations FOCUS ON SPECIAL SECTION VIRTUAL The EMT in the picture above isn’t real. But someday he might train someone to save your life. By Holly Dolezalek VISION antibiotics to help deal with any infection after the appendectomy. Suddenly, the patient’s blood pressure crashes and everything goes wrong. Before you know it, he’s dead. Why? Because, although the hospital has his medical records, you didn’t think to check and see if he’s allergic to any medications—and he was allergic to penicillin. Now what? Fortunately for you, you haven’t really killed the patient. The patient isn’t real, any more than your black-haired doctor. The doctor looks real enough, and he’s performed an awful lot of life-saving measures in his time. But he is only an avatar, a carefully rendered digital person. Trainee nurses I 40 magine you’re a jut-jawed, black-haired doctor learning to specialize in emergency room techniques. You have a lot of knowledge about disease and injury, but you need some practical experience so you can deal with emergency situations. So you go into an emergency room for a shift, and a patient arrives by ambulance. He’s vomiting, running a fever, and complaining of pain in the right side of his abdomen, which suggests to you that he has appendicitis. His appendix may even have ruptured. So he’s rushed into surgery, and you tell the nurse to give the patient a dose of | OCTOBER 2007 t r a i n i n g w w w. t r a i n i n g m a g . c o m http://www.trainingmag.com
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