From the Washington Post website: "Diane McFarland injected oranges with shots during nursing school until she felt confident enough to prick human subjects. Then she and her classmates took turns on each other.
Nurses at Inova Loudoun Hospital can now practice on SimMan 3G, a life-size patient simulator in a virtual reality lab that opened Monday on the first floor of the Leesburg facility.
"With the mannequin, it feels like the deltoid muscle," said McFarland, as a visitor touched synthetic skin that feels remarkably humanlike and is engineered to have the same level of tension and resistance as human skin.
At the hospital since 1996, she now directs the professional practice division.
"It's a safe setting," she said. "You know you're not going to injure that patient."
SimMan, who weighs about 90 pounds, sits in a regular hospital bed. He sweats, blinks and bleeds. His chest rises and recedes. A computer tracks his vitals.
An instructor, holding a wireless tablet from behind tinted glass, can control his movement. When a nurse injects a given dose of potassium, the mannequin is programmed to react as a human of his size would.
Administering shots is one of the most basic tasks. Nurses can practice intubating and shocking the faux patient. One of the pre-programmed scenarios is treating a morphine overdose.
"Oh, I can't breathe and my chest hurts," SimMan said during a Thursday demonstration. "Help."
He can even have a sex change. But that's not one of the procedures they practice. Instead, they put on a wig and change the voice to sound feminine.
A seven-pound baby simulator looks remarkably lifelike. In one test, he has a seizure and a nurse must respond to a crying baby.
"I can loop that over and over again," said Dee Eldardiri, a nurse at the hospital for two years, as the baby blared recorded moans of pain.
There are male, female and child-size arms to practice inserting IVs, with fake blood. A software program gives whoever's doing it a percentage score based on following procedures and inserting the needle in the right place on the first try.
"It's like a video game," said Christine Stone, a nurse educator who has worked in the Inova system for 18 years. "You want 100 percent all the time."
The Claude Moore Charitable Foundation provided a $500,000 grant to pay for the state-of-the-art equipment.
Laerdal Medical, which sells the equipment, offers modules for dealing with unusual problems that might crop up in an emergency room. Inova Loudoun purchased the Emergency Preparedness Scenarios for Terrorism package, meant to help nurses practice treating someone exposed to nerve gas, an improvised explosive device (IED) or a dirty bomb.
"This is kind of cool because this is probably, hopefully, the only way they'll ever get experience with it," Eldardiri said. "We're exploring new territory."
A primary goal, though, is to test nurse competency on responding to basic everyday maladies like leg fractures and chest pains. Inova Loudoun received recognition by the American Nurses Credentialing Center as a Magnet hospital in 2006, the group's highest level of honor and something that soon comes up for standard review.
Universities increasingly use simulators like these to train students. After the practice, nurses can watch videos of themselves and get debriefed by instructors on what they could do better next time.
"It's kind of cutting edge for a community hospital to have something like this," Stone said. "