Meet the practice patient
A patient lies quietly and uncomplaining in a dark room at Taranaki’s Base Hospital.
His heart rate machine is beeping, he’s breathing, blinking, has intravenous therapy lines in his arms and although his pulse has been known to stop, he never dies. His name is Oscar and he’s the Taranaki hospital’s robopatient, a $120,000 electronic manikin used to train surgical teams at the hospital.
But if you walked past the room and gazed in you’d have no idea he wasn’t a human being.
Oscar, an acronym for Organised Simulated Care and Response, is so realistic that many who train with him find him ‘‘creepy’’. He has multiple masks to change his appearance and can even have his gender changed too.
‘‘He cries, he sweats, he mimics trauma,’’ said Alan Thomson, an anaesthetist and the lead simulation technician.
Oscar even talks, Thomson said gesturing toward a headset microphone.
Oscar can die, but he hasn’t died during a training session yet. The robo-patient responds to drugs, his tongue can swell, his jaw can tense, his pupils can dilate and it’s even possible to feel his pulse in his groin.
Oscar can have fake blood run through his veins, and all the drugs used on him are real, said Dr Jonathan Albrett, an anaesthetist and lead simulation trainer.
The lead simulation trainer had been involved in many different scenarios with Oscar now, including cardiac arrest, a difficult airway and uncontrolled surgical bleeding. The exercises are used for surgical team building and are occasionally more extreme than real surgery. ‘‘Everyone’s stressed; it’s quite challenging,’’ he said.