Gov. Jan Brewer dedicated a high-tech medical training center Wednesday designed to help military personnel prepare for battlefield emergencies.
Brewer lauded Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn Medical Center’s partnership between military and civilian personnel and highlighted the new $1.6 million facility’s expected impact on medical training.
“Few missions can be more important than enhancing the training of our physicians, surgeons, nurses and other military personnel,” Brewer said. “[This center] is not only a model for our state as a successful public-private partnership, but a model for our entire country.”
The 7,500-square-foot center adds six training rooms featuring high-tech mannequins that mimic the functions of the human body and simulate battlefield injuries.
“These are very lifelike,” said Keith Withycombe, chairman of the Scottsdale Healthcare Foundation. “They have heartbeats. They have the ability to talk. They even respond to treatment. They even bleed — very realistic.”
The center also adds classroom and meeting space equipped with teleconferencing and audio-visual capabilities for reviewing trainees’ performances.
Jayme Ambrose, director of corporate and community health at Scottsdale Healthcare, said simulation and video recording technology allows trainees to review their performance and provides a more immersive training experience.
“[Trainees] get hands-on experience that gets them ready to provide those services in a emergency environment,” she said. “We’re able to run scenarios for our trauma nurses that no other technology provides. It just enhances the entire experience.”
Wendy Lyons, vice president of community stewardship for Scottsdale Healthcare, said the organization’s military partnership grew in the aftermath of 9/11, when it established a public-private partnership with Luke Air Force Base in 2002. Now, Scottsdale Healthcare has expanded that partnership to every branch of the armed forces.
More than 1,000 military professionals from all branches of the armed forces have received training from the program since 2004. Lyons said she expects the center to train 400 personnel this year and reach an annually capacity of 1,000 trainees in the near future.
Gen. Craig R. McKinley, the Arlington, Va.-based chief of the National Guard Bureau, said the center’s ability to straddle both military and civilian worlds will help dispel any disconnect between the two.
“What better way to close that gap than training and working together toward a common goal,” he said. “The military partnership here at Scottsdale Healthcare has created an environment where our military health care professionals can interact and train with their civilian counterparts, providing that connectivity.”
Retired Army nurse Elizabeth Tichenor, 91, attended the ceremony to see the new mannequins.
“[This is] a fantastic way for those young men to get training, instead of on cadavers,” she said.
Correction: Article was at first incorrectly attributed to Lauren Gambino.
ernie13x posted at 6:15 am on Thu, Jan 20, 2011.
Jan Brewer, stay away from ANYTHING related to our military before you ruin it the way you did Az. What an insult having you there! Couldn't they get someone of importance to attend this ceremony? Oh, probably not, everyone important is boycotting this hate-mongering sandbox.
Arizonainjun posted at 9:41 am on Thu, Jan 20, 2011.
As an arizona resident I really dislike people like you who live here knocking the state, if it's so bad leave and good bye. The state is in bad shape because we depended on the visitors and their money not always a good stable source. There's alot of revenue out there that the state needs to address, one for instance is out of staters living here, working here and still using the out of state plates and registration on their cars or they buy cars and register them out of state lots of taxes being lost there. The state and even the federal government can stop a lot of loss simply by cutting back on the legal holidays, not only are we paying the people not to work but over time during and after the day is gone it amounts to one hellious amount of money. Let's try 5 or 6 holidays not 13 and working on #14. Janet N. ran away from the state and left it in this mess don't blame Janet B.
rrjenn posted at 9:35 pm on Fri, Jan 21, 2011.
Ya ernie why don't you immigrate to New Mexico.