By Heather Hintze
EUGENE, Ore. -- You may have seen seen it on medical TV shows. A patient stops breathing and a staff person yells, "Code Blue." For staff at Sacred Heart, it's a real-life situation that doesn't happen that often. So practice is very important.
"It's someone's life that you're dealing with. It's in your hands. So you have to be able to know what you're doing and be able to do it quickly," said ER tech Kevin Crawford.
Fortunately for these students, the life in their hands is only simulated. Hi-fidelity mannequins represent real-life situations.
"People can have the opportunity to learn and have the opportunity to make a mistake and to learn from those mistakes and then when the real emergency happens, which they don't happen that often then we're ready," said ICU clinical nurse specialist Patty Everett.
Each mannequin can be programmed for different medical conditions. 'Dee Dee' is programmed for the worst case scenario.
"She went from completely normal to someone that had....to where someone's not breathing, doesn't have a pulse. It's pretty hard to bring someone back from that but it's possible and that's what the practice is to do today," said Crawford.
"Despite everything that happens, the patient might still die and that's a fact of life. That's a reality," said Everett.
Across the room, students work to resuscitate a baby who's stopped breathing and is turning blue.
"We had to do the respirations, the face turned blue, you can hear the sounds. It almost felt like you were really taking care of a baby because it was so lifelike. It was scary," said certified nursing assistant student, Christina York.
But it doesn't happen very often. Between August 2008 and 2009, RiverBend had only 37 Code Blue calls.
"Luckily we infrequently have codes so it's not something we get to practice very often on real people, which is good. But because of that reason we also need to practice on manequins so when we do have a patient that gets really sick and stops breathing, we know what to do," said pediatric clinical educator, Sara Fenstermacher.
Through fundraising, Sacred Heart hopes to get eight more simulation mannequins so it can set up a permanent practice lab at the University District campus.
