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Who's Killing Stan?
However human Stan may appear with his realistic skin, beating heart, respiration, sweat and 98.6-degree body temperature, he is only a machine.
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ALL THE STAFF members in the anesthesiology department say they love the patient known as “Stan,” but if that’s really true, you have to wonder...
Why do they keep killing him?
The truth is they do because they can. After all, however human Stan may appear with his realistic skin, beating heart, respiration, sweat and 98.6-degree body temperature, he is not a real patient.
“Stan” is the name given a sophisticated computerized simulator designed to mimic an actual patient in a variety of situations. As such, he routinely suffers heart attacks, overdoses and other ailments which – when medical students are too slow to diagnose and treat them properly – often prove fatal.
One of two such simulators in California and one of only 30 worldwide, Stan was purchased by Los Angeles County in 1996 for $250,000. USC’s anesthesiology department pays the $50,000 annual operating cost.
The simulator can run more than 100 scenarios, and its cues are nearly as realistic as those of a human patient – including pupils that dilate and vocal cords that can impede attempts at intubation.
Students swipe bar-coded syringes filled with water past a laser scanner that determines what drug is being injected, and the simulator determines the body’s proper response to the dose. For example, the proper drug and dosage may relax constricted airways, while the wrong combination might stop a beating heart.
Ron Katz, chair of the anesthesiology department, hails the simulator as an important advance in teaching.
“Before, students would have basically observed certain procedures, but now they get hands-on experience with them,” he says. “They practice making the diagnosis and administering the right therapy. If they get it wrong, well, I’d rather have my student ‘kill’ the machine than a patient.”
There’s No Place Like Home
ou should be more afraid of being killed by your husband than being shot on the freeway,” criminologist Malcolm Klein said in a May 3 Los Angeles Times article that detailed the sometimes-ridiculous steps being taken for protection in the wake of three shootings in which the victims were women in white cars.
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