Christopher Powers

 

KINGSTON, R.I. - Inside the brand new five-story University of Rhode Island Pharmacy Building one will find beautiful classrooms, a CVS Pharmacy, fountains that filter your water, and dummies. But don’t call them dummies, especially around the co-director of human patient simulation, Amanda De Angelis. 

 

“The correct terminology is actually human patient simulator and these are high fidelity human patient simulators,” she said. 

 

Human patient simulators are the realistic dummies that students can perform tests on and learn how to respond to potentially life-threatening drug interactions. But what exactly does the high fidelity part mean?

 

“High fidelity is essentially making it as life-like as possible,” De Angelis said, adding, “Simulators come in two groupings, one is low fidelity (less life-like) and high fidelity (more life-like).” 

    

De Angelis said the closer to life-like you get the better. The simulators are used for many purposes and when looked at up-close can actually be frightening because they are very close to real. Dr. Clinton Chichester also co-director of human patient simulation thinks the simulators can do even more then we may think.

    

“I think that we can use simulation for a lot of things and I am open to everybody’s ideas,” he said, adding, “There is a lot we can to from introducing the idea of a different medical profession to showing how patients are and how they respond to drugs, there’s so many things we can do.”

    

The simulators are used for testing and unique ways of teaching and that’s why Chichester said they call it a simulation laboratory rather then simulation center. 

    

“We call it a laboratory so that we can test different teaching approaches,” he said. 

    

The simulators come in male and female form, by interchanging the parts so to speak, and they also come in different sizes, rather than just the adult size. 

    

“We have a pediatric model which is about a 5 to 7 year old child, “ De Angelis said, “And the baby is approximated to a 6 month old.” 

    

URI is one of the only colleges of pharmacy to have this extensive simulation center De Angelis said. They were also one of the first to have a simulator, which they got 10 years ago. She said they are very expensive and also expensive to maintain. 

    

“They are expensive there is no doubt about it,” she said, adding, “Most of the money for them have been derived by ourselves through the Champlin Foundation for example, through grant work.”