Bio Skills Teaching Laboratory

Total cost: $4.6 million

CDP Funding: $2.0 million

The new Bio Skills Teaching Laboratory is the largest teaching area of its type in Adelaide.

The laboratory consolidates existing training and learning spaces and incorporates adjoining space. This larger teaching space caters for increasing student numbers and the area is equipped with state-of-the-art technology including technologyrobotic mannequins, ‘human patient simulators’, that imitate a living human body.

The University of Adelaide is a key training provider for the health workforce in South Australia and recognises that recruiting overseas professionals is not the best long-term solution. As a result, the University’s Faculty of Health Sciences has received a significant number of additional places to train doctors and nurses and help eliminate the current shortfall.

These additional places, together with normal projected growth, demand the University institutes a number of efficiencies – both in teaching and in the way space is currently used for the study, preparation and dissection of anatomical specimens, critical aspects of training doctors and nurses.

The two components of the Bio Skills Teaching Laboratory are larger and vastly more efficient teaching areas and overcome a significant reality for the University’s medical students – a shortage of cadavers which are essential in the study of anatomy.

With respect to simulation in medicine, the rapid development of computers and software has seen the advent of sophisticated, realistic simulators that reproduce clinical settings in the finest detail. Human patient simulators produce lung, heart, and bowel sounds, have anatomically correct pulses and respond to medical and pharmacological interventions with appropriate responses.

They can be programmed to speak and, thus, interact with clinicians much like an actual patient.

By any judgement, simulators today are an effective and highly cost efficient educational tool and are well accepted by students. Their use promotes students’ critical thinking skills and enables them to:

• experience pre-programmed rare events
• repeat procedures and experiences
• learn by making errors without causing harm
• observe different outcomes of a situation that stem from the actions chosen
• practise teamwork, debriefing, and team interactions.