SANFORD - The Central Carolina Community College Nursing Program students will have the opportunity to receive training on the new Luna newborn simulator from CAE Healthcare.

"We had been discussing purchasing a newborn or pediatric patient simulator for a few years now, so that the nursing students could have access to simulators across the lifespan. We have several adult simulators and a birthing mother simulator, but we did not have a baby," said Dixie Holden, Instructor in the CCCC Louise Tuller School of Nursing. "We were able to purchase the first Luna that will come off of the assembly line."

Holden said the hope is that through simulation, nurses are better prepared to care for patients in safe and effective ways.

"With simulation, we can allow nursing students at Central Carolina Community College to practice on a simulated patient in every possible scenario to develop critical thinking skills, so that when the time comes to care for a real patient, the nurse has had a variety of experiences where he or she has been able to make decisions and see the outcomes of their decisions, whether good or bad," said Holden. "Nursing students are allowed to take their skills, participate in a simulation, and self-evaluate where their strengths and weaknesses are and learn how they will improve for the next time they are in a similar situation.

"Our most vulnerable patients are often the youngest of our population. Newborns can take a turn for the worst right before your eyes. We do not want new nurses to be put in situations where, when a baby's life is at stake, it is the first time the nurse experiences the need to make life or death decisions based solely on what they have read in a book and were able to answer a related multiple choice question," said Holden. "Luna is a human patient simulator (HPS) and is designed to put nurses in real-life situations with a newborn patient to see how they handle different scenarios and allow them to gain confidence and skills in the lab. They can then take those skills into the clinical setting to provide safer patient care and decrease medical errors, which claim over 250,000 lives each year in the United States."

Lisa Godfrey, CCCC Dean of Health Sciences and Human Services, said, "The Central Carolina Community College Louise Tuller School of Nursing is incredibly fortunate to be the first college to receive the Luna simulator. This simulator allows our faculty and nursing students to practice skills without a negative impact on patient care outcomes," said Godfrey. "In reality, this type of simulator technology improves a student's ability to impact positive patient treatment outcomes because they can make mistakes and perfect technique through simulation and watching the outcome of the decisions they make on patient scenarios."

To learn more about the Central Carolina Community College Nursing Program, visit www.cccc.edu/nursing.