In one of his first duties since his formal installation at Aston University’s first winter graduation ceremony on 20 January, the University’s new Chancellor, Dr Jason Wouhra, has opened a £1.5 m healthcare teaching facility at the University which includes two interconnecting five-bed wards and an interactive immersive room.
Funded by the Office for Students, it is to be used by nursing, physician associate, pharmacy and medical students. The wards are designed to be realistic, and include real hospital furniture and hospital headwalls with simulated gases, a nurse call system, and the ability to simulate power cuts. Each ward has a nursing station and storage for consumables. There are hoists for the students to practise moving patients, including a ceiling-mounted such system for use with bariatric patients.
The suite is equipped with diverse manikins, include of a very elderly patient, a teenage cancer patient, and a young girl with Down’s Syndrome. In 2023, Aston University commissioned a realistic overweight (bariatric) manikin, R42, from Simulation Man, ‘for more realistic and inclusive training’. It has a working stoma site and urinary system, a chest compression unit, and an IV line.
Simulating a wide range of hospital, domestic, and outdoor settings, an interactive immersive room will also support a new mental health nursing programme, currently recruiting for September 2025. One of the wards will have an isolation area to enable nursing students to practise caring for patients with infectious diseases. This area also has an ante-room with trough sinks and elbow taps so it can double up as a surgery area for scrubbing up.
Additionally, cameras will be installed to record simulations, with recordings of healthcare scenarios staged in the new wards being able either to be ‘livestreamed’ to students in elsewhere to watch and discuss, or for play back to the students involved in the simulation themselves to debrief them on their actions and performance.
Professor Liz Moores, Deputy Dean of the College of Health and Life Sciences at Aston University, said: “The new wards represent further progress towards Aston University’s aim to become a leading provider of healthcare education. We want our students to be well-prepared even before they go out on their first placements. The new facilities will enable us to simulate a wide variety of scenarios. The immersive room will also enhance our ability to provide innovative and fun teaching that the students will enjoy and remember.”
Dr Wouhra said: “At Aston University we are continually looking to innovate and improve our offering to students. The more immersive we can make our training, and the more we can foster entrepreneurial mindsets in our students, the higher chances they have of succeeding and making a difference to wider society.
“It’s why we have invested in this new facility, and it really was breathtaking to see first-hand how the new facility and its state-of-the-art kit replicates real-life medical scenarios.”