The Copeland Health and Education Pavilion at SLO’s French Hospital Medical Center hosted an open house March 28 for members and guests of the Central Coast Softec Association, giving an inside look at a new high-tech training and patient care facility.
Some 40 visitors got tech-oriented presentations about what goes on inside the sealed medical bays of a recently completed surgical suite, as well as new training centers on the ground floor of the Copeland Building.
The surgical suite focuses on cardiac techniques allowing, “almost everything except a transplant,” according to staffers who took time from their rotations to speak with the tour group.
An education center has classrooms for the community, as well as automated patient simulators for professional training.
The mechanical automatons are hardcore residents of the “uncanny valley,” a hypothesis holding that replicas, which appear almost like real human beings elicit feelings of eeriness or revulsion.
Medical students, emergency personnel re-upping CPR certificates, and other trainees, will have to face their “patients” blinking, laughing, saying “ouch” and even talking according to an instructor’s command.
Nurses explained that the training rooms are made as lifelike as possible, with supplies and outdated medical equipment filling the rooms, and walls for as realistic an environment as possible, like something out of Hollywood might appear.
The simulation rooms can be recorded or broadcast live to a conference center upstairs for observation and feedback that reaches beyond the immediate drills.
And the “patients” can be moved into the ER or theater scenarios for use with more advanced equipment or realistic scenarios.
The robotic mannequin, “Coco,” for example, has been used in multiple C-section drills, although, staff noted, students do not cut into the models and realistic, though sterile, fluids are substituted for effect.
While a maximum of 15 audience participants at a time were able to take the downstairs tour, the Softec group heard lectures on some of the more advanced treatments in anesthesiology, heart valve replacement, and electrophysiology.
The hospital’s Advanced Surgical Hybrid Suite gets its name from an ability to host procedures under multiple disciplines, sometimes congruently.
After all, you never know when a complication may arise requiring another expert.
The more predictable procedures include angioplasty, implantation of pacemakers, stent placement and treatment of atrial fibrillation.
Dr. Chris Porterfield, electrophysiologist at French, likened his job to that of an electrician, giving a cursory rundown of the start of his field, from the electrocution of chickens with early batteries, preceding to the temporary revival of an executed man in 1818, to the modern field working with Cal Poly engineering students to innovate on the old pacemaker concepts.
“The nice thing about students,” he said, “is they don’t think of the budget. They come up with off the wall ideas.”
Thankfully the students aren’t involved when it comes to catheter ablation, that is burning, or freezing away with a probe abnormal or damaged tissue inside a patient’s arteries or heart.
“All my patients have my cell phone or email,” said Dr. Porterfield. “So I get lots of interesting questions daily.”
Softec has put out a call for businesses and individuals that would be interested in speaking at Softec’s monthly Tech Brew events in SLO and Santa Maria. Presentations are vetted based on community interest and are approximately 20 minutes. Email: [email protected] for information.
– Photo by Camas Frank
