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New facility keeps it real

After four years on the move lugging training mannequins from one lecture hall to another, the International Midwifery Pre-registration program at Ryerson University in Toronto finally has an instructional space of its own.

DAVID CHILTON

[ 2006-02-15 ]

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Student midwives at the Chang School Simulation Lab use interactive learning, trained actors and mannequins to simulate real-life situations.

The Chang School Simulation Lab, as the new facility is called, officially opened Feb. 9 and is funded by the Ontario government. For the time being, the purpose of the lab is to allow midwives trained abroad to practice and enhance their skills in life-like simulated situations before they are registered and allowed to start delivering babies in the province. However, at some point the lab will be opened up to other foreign-trained health-care professionals, says Holliday Tyson, director of the program at Ryerson.

100% PASS RATE

Tyson says before the introduction of the simulated learning approach -- mannequins, interactive learning, actors pretending to be pregnant women and their anxious spouses -- the pass rate for midwives educated overseas was only 32%. However, she says that figure has jumped to a 100% pass rate over the last four years.

She says not only do almost all the women in the program have to learn another language as an adult, they also have to contend with specialized communication such as clinical and inter-professional English. A new language, traditional lecture-based instruction, learning the newest obstetric skills and adapting to the ways of Canadian midwifery meant that when her student midwives went out on placements they had trouble orienting themselves and froze.

"So almost from the very first year we started to use simulation-based learning," Tyson says. "We already knew to do that for our exams. But what we learned in the first couple of years of the program was how much more effective simulation-based learning would be for people than traditional learning."

A large part of the simulation is the use of mannequins. Tyson says the new lab has one such figure called Sim Man that cost $60,000. Sim Man can be programmed to simulate very life-like conditions, but the program has chosen six less high-tech mannequins -- each costing $10,000 -- for the bulk of its teaching, although two of that six can be set up so they "give birth."

Rounding out the simulations are interactive learning and a fictional case load of clients and trained actors -- who sometimes call the student midwife's pager at 3 a.m. just to keep it real.

Arlene Vandersloot is one of those actors. A midwife herself, and a student assessor and communications teacher in the program, Vandersloot says, "It (simulation) really does work. A lot of the time it does feel real."

SHARED LEARNING

Simulation also speeds up learning, adds Vandersloot, who says in midwifery in Canada there's a tradition of shared learning, which is what simulation does.

A 2005 graduate of the Ryerson program is Nasrin Bandari Vali, who came to Canada as a refugee from Iran in 2000. She'd worked as a midwife in Iran for four years and had delivered about 4,000 babies, most of them in hospitals since home births there are considered something for villagers or the lower classes.

Bandari Vali is enthusiastic about simulation-based learning. "This isn't just a program that you get with a mark," she says. "I know what I have to do. I know what I have to say."

She obviously does. Bandari Vali now works for KW Midwifery Associates in Kitchener-Waterloo and has already delivered about 40 Canadian babies.

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