Charlotte E. Maguire, M.D. and Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare
Center for Clinical Simulation

The Charlotte E. Maguire, M.D. and Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare Center for Clinical Simulation is a state-of-the-art medical education center that provides opportunities for students to gain clinical experience and skills in a no-risk environment. The simulation center is equipped with mannequins that can simulate a variety of conditions, from wheezing to a heart murmur to cardiac arrest, enabling students to learn how to react to the unexpected in a no-risk environment.

The mannequins provide a valuable extension of the Clinical Learning Center’s standardized patient program. For example, the mannequins can be programmed to present pathology on demand according to the curriculum. “If we want to tell the mannequin to wheeze, we will tell it to wheeze, and we can get the same wheeze in all four rooms in four different mannequins so that every student is trained exactly the same,” said Dr. Steve Quintero, the simulation center’s director and an assistant professor of family medicine and rural health at the College of Medicine.

When the simulation center opened in the spring of 2008, first-year medical students participated in an integrated education module and were expected to identify basic valve disorders in four simulation patients using stethoscope, blood pressure and other physiologic data. The students worked in teams and were challenged to explain their findings to the instructor to get immediate feedback. The exercise combined skills and knowledge learned in doctoring and physiology courses.