Lights, camera, medical emergency!
What started out as a campus tour and orientation for about a dozen prospective American Career College students ended up a real-time simulation on how different programs at ACC-Lynwood interact during a medical event.
Hospital Drama
Usually telling an actor "don't choke" is good advice, but not for Karolyn Dardon. Dardon, a vocational nursing student at ACC-Lynwood, played the patient in February's "A Class Act."
• What's your secret to stay in character?
“There was a point where I actually was choking a little bit on my Gatorade, but it’s OK because it helped my performance.”
• Why are you studying VN?
“I’ve always loved the medical field — it’s never-ending. My curiosity is endless so medical science provides me a way to keep exploring the unknown. Vocational nursing lets me be near all that beautiful stuff."
• How is your clinical training going?
“St. Francis is incredible. The teachers are super helpful. Any question you have, they’ll answer. And if they can’t answer it, another teacher will. The hands-on experience is definitely there."
“This is something that they will be confronted with every day, maybe different scenarios, but the process is the same — using critical thinking, quick decision making and giving the appropriate treatment like they’ve been taught,” Vanessa Nicolas, a vocational nursing instructor at ACC-Lynwood, said.
The demonstration began in a classroom. After several of the ACC-Lynwood program directors introduced themselves, an ACC student suddenly began simulating she was choking. Unable to restore her breathing, ACC students then rushed the patient to an emergency room next door. There, a group examined and worked on her until she eventually "coded," which means no longer breathing or having a pulse. ACC students then performed CPR on a medical mannequin until they restored a heartbeat. Finally, a pair of medical billing and coding students came up with the cost of the patient's treatment and presented the now-recovered student with her bill.
“As an inter-departmental team, everyone in the hospital works together to make sure the patient survives and has good care, so this is just a scenario of some of the things that our students learn here," Nicolas told the crowd gathered in the skills lab. "Hopefully our students can use these skills — these real-life skills — in an actual working environment when they leave here."
ACC-Lynwood Student Resource Center Manager Norlean Cedeno said students get very involved in the simulation — or ‘A Class Act’ — and enjoy showing off the skills they've acquired while in the program.
“It’s an exciting point where they’re able to share and demonstrate how they would perform in an emergency situation — not only to show what they’ve learned but also to demonstrate to new possible students and their families what they can learn as well,” Cedeno said.
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