The Communique

Issue date: 11/12/09 Section: News

Practical nursing students Sheena Copeland and Emily Drews work with a simulator during a lab session at the Kirkwood Healthcare Simulation Center. The center, which opened in August, is on the second floor of Linn Hall.

The National Disaster Life Support Foundation has approved the new Kirkwood Healthcare Simulation Center as an advanced training center, allowing Kirkwood Community College to offer basic and advanced disaster life support courses to health care providers.

"We are the first NDLS training center in Iowa," said Mike McLaughlin, the Kirkwood center's director. "A lot of places in Iowa, either hospitals or education centers, do simulation and a lot of them do it very well. What set us apart is we think that we have a completely integrated environment."

The National Disaster Life Support Foundation was established in 2004 to better prepare health care and emergency personnel for mass casualty situations.

Kirkwood's $2.6 million simulation center opened in August. The 12,000-square-foot facility is on the second floor of Linn Hall. It offers six patient care rooms and an observation classroom.

The center owns seven high-fidelity simulators: a baby, a child, a pregnant woman and four adults, McLaughlin said. All run with computers so they can simulate breathing and talking and do "basically everything a human body can do," he said.

McLaughlin said the center plans to establish a mobile simulation lab, which would allow the center to offer training throughout the seven-county area Kirkwood serves.

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