Next fall, the UCF College of Medicine will welcome its first class of students, and with it, a new curriculum enhanced by the latest in injury simulation technology.
"The medical school is going to be a medical school that is very much in this century as opposed to last century, and we're seeking tools to better enable us to teach our students and faculty ways that would make the quality of care better and reduce errors," said Deborah German, dean of the College of Medicine, regarding the school's association with the Virtual Reality Medical Center in an effort to integrate realistic wound effects into the forthcoming curriculum.
"The school is partnering with the simulation industry here to use those tools effectively to train our medical students," German said.
Those tools include VRMC's latex makeup effects, currently employed for practical purposes in the military and medical fields. The San Diego-based company has been working with injury creation technology since 2004. Angela Salva has been with them for almost a year, serving as director of the company's Orlando operations.
"The fact that we're a medical simulation company, that Orlando is a nexus of medical technology, that the new school of medicine is welcoming its first class next year, and the growth of biotech - those are the factors that brought us here," Salva said. "We were able to find willing partners in the area, and this school has the highest technology - with the Institute for Simulation and Training, CREOL's another hotbed of technology - and the intentions of Dean German to incorporate new technology in the curriculum."
Salva admitted to being made uncomfortable by the gruesome nature of the lifelike wounds.
"I think it's pretty graphic. I don't have a stomach for wounds, I have a background in computers, and it's graphic enough to make me uncomfortable. I know it's not real, but if it feels like skin, it must be skin; if it smells like blood and looks like blood, you know… If it's adhered to an actor, if someone's wearing the wound, it's a lot more immersive, versus sitting in the lab holding them."
Working with synthetic silicone over the less suitable likes of latex, the goal of the "stand-alone" wound kits will ideally be easy enough for students to use in the practice of treating traumas without the aid of makeup effects specialists. As the curriculum remains in development, the involvement of medical students in practice scenarios has yet to be determined.
The technology, though, will continue to progress throughout the continuing course of research and experimentation.
"We're working on making the smells more realistic and making the skin reactive," said Salva. "We're taking it to the next step."
However, German insists that this equipment will not be the only means by which UCF's medical students will receive their instruction.
"Students will be learning in different formats - lecture, groups, experiential, individually, online - because many students learn in many different ways," German said. "Our education will be a multi-modal one, and this is part of what we're going to teach, not the whole... The UCF College of Medicine plans to take the existing approach to medical education and enhance it with today's tools, and this is one example."
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