School of Nursing and Health Studies students Francesca Lanata, BSN ’20, and Julia Sather, BSN ’20, were completing one of their last clinical days in a Miami-area hospital when they heard the commotion.
Their eyes locked on a patient being rushed toward a large room with a crash cart.
“Francesca and I were looking at each other, wondering if we could go in," says Sather. "We couldn’t believe it was happening."
“It” was a code blue, and just 24 hours earlier, Sather and Lanata had spent the day in the Simulation Hospital for Advancing Research and Education (S.H.A.R.E.™) practicing lifesaving scenarios like the one they were now witnessing in the emergency department.
“They had us do different roles each time: bag valve mask, AED, chest compressions,” Lanata says of the simulation. “It was all about learning to communicate very well with everybody in that emergency situation. Once we got everything on the checklist down, we tried to do it in four minutes instead of five to improve our timing.”
The timing of the simulation itself proved fateful. “If we hadn’t had the sim before this actual code, I feel like we would have been lost,” admits Lanata.
Instead, ushered into an out-of-the-way corner of the room by their supervising nurse, they recognized every step of the code blue happening right in front of them.
“The first thing I noticed was that someone was on a stepping stool doing compressions, and the doctor was preparing for intubation,” says Sather. “I remember seeing the patient’s bare chest. People were scattering around to get supplies.”
Everything was fast.
“You hear everyone say ‘clear, clear, clear,’ and then, ‘shock advised.’ It sounded just like our sim,” recalls Lanata. “It was cycles of CPR and bag valve mask, and giving the patient breaths—and the patient finally got a pulse.”
Sather and Lanata, who graduated from the school’s Accelerated BSN program in December, felt grateful for this real-life reinforcement of their simulated experience, not to mention relieved to see the patient revived.
"The biggest difference between what we did in simulation and the real-life code blue was that the level of intensity is through the roof when you’re in a real situation,” observes Sather. “But the teamwork and order of procedure were the same.”
“It was amazing from one day to the next to see it in real life,” marvels Lanata. “It gave me confidence to know that what I’m learning in sim can be applied—and that the thought process I had in simulation would be correct in real life. I feel very lucky I chose UM because I feel like we were able to have the in-person clinical experience students at other schools weren’t able to have during COVID.”
