'It gets a little unnerving sometimes': Edgecombe Community College uses simulations to give nursing students real-life experience

To bridge that healthcare gap, Edgecombe Community College is giving healthcare students real-world experience using high-tech simulated patients.

In a hospital room in downtown Rocky Mount on Monday, a team of nursing students worked to rescue a "patient" who was quickly getting worse. While it looked and felt real, there wasn’t an actual life on the line.

“What we do is, we simulate as if we were in the hospital setting," ECC nursing student Kimberly Jennings said.

Edgecombe Community College has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in high-tech simulated patients to train their budding healthcare workers.

“We have all of that equipment in this area so that the first time a student walks in to an operating room, it’s not an unknown environment for them at all,” ECC surgical technology program chair Suzi Shippen-Wagner said.

Students still need to take conventional classes to become nurses, respiratory therapists and surgical technologists. But instructors said the hands-on training was what set the program apart – even down to a simulated birthing room.

“She really can scream,” Shippen-Wagner said. “She really can blink her eyes, and it gets a little unnerving sometimes.”

Program leaders said ECC has set up a pipeline to Edgecombe County hospitals, which have been in dire need of healthcare workers.

“We’re facing an incredible shortage nationwide,” ECC nursing director Barbara Knopp said. “The people who come here generally stay, we’re really not training them to go somewhere else.”

Students said while their patients may not have been real yet, the skills they’ve been learning were, setting them up for success when they eventually would be called on to save a life.

“All the anxiety, all the little jitters, they’ll all be worked out,” Jennings said. “So when I walk in, I’ll be ready to be part of the team.”

Leaders of the department said their ultimate goal was to expand the number of students enrolled in the nursing program and offer evening classes as well.