Recently, your support helped fund two essential skills training mannequins. These pieces of equipment play a fundamental role in the training, assessment and improvement of nurses and doctors within the hospital’s oncology and critical care units.

Training mannequins are dolls designed to represent a baby or child as realistically as possible and allow clinicians the opportunity to practice and perfect procedures. Before now, the units had no option other than to borrow training mannequins from other departments or use far older versions which were less advanced in their training features and their ability to re-create life-like scenarios.

In the oncology unit, one of the mannequins is now being used to provide initial and then continued training and assessment on clinical skills like NG tube insertion, tracheostomy care, accessing ports and administering subcutaneous injections. It’s also proving useful in teaching parents how to administer care before being discharged home. The mannequin on PCCU comes with its own monitor which allows the training clinician to monitor vital signs exactly as they would in a critical care situation. It also has a control panel that the trainer can use to change the doll’s breathing rate and pulse.

PCCU, practice educator, Carris Bude, says: “In critical care there’s no margin for error so we need to make sure that each member of staff is skilled and knows how to react, both individually and as part of the wider team. A child’s condition can change very quickly here and there are often multiple things going on at once. The technology allows us to mimic different scenarios in the most life-like way possible so everyone, from a newly qualified nurse to an experienced consultant, gets the best opportunity to learn, practice and improve their practice.”