Nova Southeastern University expands its Medical Sonography Program with an additional three ScanTrainers.
The Pallavi Patel College of Health Care Sciences at Nova Southeastern University has extended its medical sonography program to include three additional ScanTrainers, to expand student access to high-fidelity simulation, hands-on practise and pathology recognition.
The Medical Sonography Program at Nova Southeastern University is a 27-month course focusing on abdominal ultrasound, vascular, and extended OBGYN, with a mission to educate students ‘to achieve excellence for the patients they care for and the community they serve’. Program Director, Rose McCalla-Henry, explained how the program has a focus on technology which provides the greatest learning experience.
“We want to make sure that the program remains innovative and to provide the best training tools or materials for the students. Yes, you could scan a phantom, but you get a lot more of the psychomotor scanning skills using a high-quality simulator. Having the ScanTrainer there makes the scanning experience very realistic, and the arm movements with the haptics are very true-to-life not just for abdominal ultrasound, but transvaginal as well. So, it’s very effective when learning those skills.”
Rose explained that although there is little substitute for scanning real patients, ScanTrainer expands learning further and provides access to low occurrence or high acuity pathology “it’s not just the hands-on learning. It is also the presentation of pathology. Which is hard to find in real-life. With ScanTrainer, Students are able to go to the simulator and complete the assignments that are given to them, and they have more opportunity of seeing pathology and being able to scan and interact with it.”
Rose explained that the students use the ScanTrainer throughout the entirety of their didactics training, from their first year, with access to ScanTrainer providing a comprehensive curriculum in ultrasound from basic probe manipulation to advanced pathology recognition.
The program invested in its first ScanTrainer in 2014. Since then, they have expanded significantly, and having over 20 students rotating on one ScanTrainer, the program struggled with access and time limitations for students. The team put together an action plan which involved purchasing an additional three ScanTrainers – bringing a total of four ScanTrainers in the program.
“The main driver was to give the students more opportunity on ScanTrainer, to complete their assignments, and practise hands-on. We now have more ScanTrainers on hand so that students are not just spending one hour or two hours or three hours throughout the program, they have the opportunity to spend much more time scanning. And as we have more, we can now schedule more students at the same time and get them in there practising and learning. So, it will really provide more opportunity to practise, to get the students to feel more comfortable scanning, with the information that they’re learning, and with OBGYN”.
Find out more about ScanTrainer below:
A comprehensive learning curriculum in Transvaginal (TV) and Transabdominal (TA) Ultrasound.
