The Living Lab is home to our state-of-the-art facilities used
by a range of our Health Sciences and Wellbeing courses, such as Nursing, Biomedical Sciences,
Pharmacy, Paramedic Sciences and Medicine. Our Sciences Complex is made up of four buildings,
Darwin, Pasteur, Fleming and Dale. The Living Lab is situated within Fleming building,
which we're going to have a look at now. Our OSCE suite which stands for Objective
Structured Clinical Examination can be used as a classroom and for practical examinations.
Our Nursing, Paramedic, Pharmacy, Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy
and Medicine students all use these facilities. Inside you can see the main classroom space
with six adjoining pods. These pods may contain different tasks for our students to carry out,
each one intended to test a different skill. Students could be asked to read a patient chart,
case study, and then go in and talk to an academic or they could be asked to give a diagnosis to one
of our PCPIs, this stands for Patient, Carer and Public Involvement participants. PCPIs
are essentially members of the public, carers or someone that has an ongoing health condition who
works with our students giving the first-hand experience of how you should communicate with
patients. They will let you know from experience what is good patient care and bad patient care.
The immersive suite is connected to the debrief room and is one of the university's most high-tech
learning tools. The debrief room, as you can see, has tv screens around the room and they are linked
to the cameras in the immersive suite. The room is three-walled, interactive and can recreate
any possible environment, within reason. We can project images, videos, play sounds and
embed information into the walls that can be activated by touch. We can make the immersive
suite into varying environments and this is vital as not all students will be working in a ward.
For Paramedic students they could be called to a football field where we can roll out astroturf,
someone's home where we can wheel in furniture and create a lived-in space,
a nightclub where we can turn the music up really loud and darken the lights, and so much more. The
immersive suite is incredible and bridges the gap between real life and the classroom. There is also
our task trainer room where students can practice smaller tasks before moving into the immersive
suite or one of the wards. Opposite the task trainer room is our dispensary. Our dispensary
is used for our Pharmacy students. There are two dispensaries side by side and students will have
classes and workshops in here. We have incredible high-tech manikins for our students to use. From
our Sim manikins which includes SimMan, SimMom, and a child version. The SimMan3G is computerized
and can be made to simulate any type of injury. He is controlled by an iPad and has
a computer in his leg which sends signals to chips around his body, they can blink,
breathe, go to the bathroom, bleed, and do nearly every bodily function that we can do.
The good thing about the manikins is students can practice on them and learn from their mistakes.
We have the Apollo manikins, these are similar to the SimMan but a little bit more high tech
and a little bit bigger as well. They do every function that the SimMan does,
however, they also sweat and cry and he also has pulse points around his body in the same places
that humans would. Finally, we have our trauma manikins, these are based on real-life people,
someone will have had their full-body scanned and they'll be turned into one of these manikins.
We have a range of men, women and children, each varying in height and weight and they all have
different functions. Some you can intubate, you can do chest compressions, you can inject them,
some you can remove a limb and add trauma limbs onto them if you're recreating an accident. You
can add real looking diseases, rashes, burns and warts, making them look even more lifelike.
Here at the University of Sunderland we have two mock wards in the Living Lab, and have
two over at Helen McArdle House. We also have a specialised mental health ward on the top floor
of Helen McArdle House. The wards mimic NHS wards, even down to the beds for our nursing students,
so when they go on placements they feel comfortable and know the environment
because of the wards on campus. Each ward is equipped with a nursing station, treatment room,
a sluice room and a demo toilet. The beds have tv screens above them and the patient's stats will
be uploaded onto there. We also have two wards over at Helen McArdle House, however, they are
set up a little differently. Outside we have two ambulance bays and one is usually taken up by
our student ambulance, as you can see it looks a little different, that's because it has to. If you
are out doing a test or a different scenario in a normal-looking ambulance you would be required to
stop, so it has to look a little different. Inside it has all the equipment a normal ambulance would.
Helen McArdle House is set up as a patient transfer suite and looks like an ER,
once you go through the doors, the reception desk is on the right-hand side and the wards splitting
off on the left. One of the wards can also be transformed into a child's ward with smaller
beds and equipment. At the top floor of Helen McArdle House we have a mental health ward.
There is a nursing desk at the very front and then six bedrooms adjoining. The bedrooms are based
on rooms within a real mental health hospital. There's nothing sharp, everything is touch pad
and there are hoists if needed. There is also emergency buttons if a patient needed support
and safety doors. The Living Lab and Helen McArdle House have incredible industry-standard facilities
and help prepare our students for placements and their careers post-graduation.
Thanks for watching, we hope to see you in the near future.