Lehigh Carbon Community College Receives Funds to Support Nursing Simulators beginning in Jan. 2017 semester

Students in Lehigh Carbon Community College’s (LCCC) nursing programs will have access to state-of-the-art patient simulators as part of a grant from the Morgan Foundation and money through the college’s federal Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education grant. Students in both the Associate Degree in Nursing and Licensed Practical Nursing program will have access to the high-fidelity clinical simulators.

Life-like simulators, depicting an adult male client and a pediatric client, will enrich the experiences that students in the nursing program have and will better prepare them for working with live patients. The simulators, including installation and training, are valued at $188,000. They will be installed, ready use in January 2017.

The simulators will help students develop their clinical reasoning skills in a safe environment. These full-scale computerized patient simulators provide a high level of interactivity and realism. The high-fidelity simulators will be incorporated into experiential learning, in support of clinical learning objectives and align with accreditation requirements.

Simulators will be located at LCCC Tamaqua at the Morgan Center site and on the main campus in Schnecksville. They represent the faculty and administration commitment to providing the best possible learning experience for students. This project supplements the clinical education students receive in both acute and non-acute settings.

When using the simulators, nursing faculty will facilitate case studies and patient care scenarios and will be able to program clinical issues similar to a live patient who presents with an emerging health care issue. The simulators can also be programmed and manipulated to demonstrate rare and critical events that can be reproduced as many times as necessary.

For more information on LCCC nursing degree programs, go to https://www.lccc.edu/academics/health-care-sciences.