Doctors and nurses practise together at Bay workshop

University of Queensland medical students teamed up with USQ nursing students to practise their skills in a simulated medical ward exercise in Hervey Bay.

Four trainee doctors from the UQ Rural Clinical School took part in the second annual Clinical Skills Workshop at the USQ Fraser Coast campus on August 20.

They were joined by six third-year nursing students working as registered nurses, and another four nursing students who played the roles of the patients in the wards.

In each scenario, the nurse was faced with a middle-of-the-night drama in a medical ward scenario and had to obtain a history, assess the patient, undertake some clinical decision making and decide when to call the doctor. They then worked with the doctor to implement the appropriate collaborative clinical treatment for the patient.

If an intravenous infusion drip was to be administered, it was inserted into a simulated arm which bled just as a real arm would bleed.
The Clinical Director of the Rural Medical School Fraser Coast, Dr Riitta Partanan, said the collaboration between the two universities gave the students a great learning experience.

'It gives them the opportunity to learn what it is like to work together,' Dr Partanan said.

'It helps to make the doctors and nurses more work-ready. It puts them in different scenarios that they would be likely to face in a hospital ward.

'Usually the medical students wouldn’t get to work one-on-one with the nurses. The medical students are supervised by doctors and the nursing students have supervision from nurses.'

The medical students are in their third and fourth years of their post graduate Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery degrees.

The Rural Clinical School offers medical students the chance to do some of their final years of study in rural settings, such as at Hervey Bay.

The idea behind it is that they are likely to return to the region to work when they become qualified doctors.

The Associate Director of the USQ Fraser Coast Faculty of Sciences, Associate Professor Trudy Yuginovich, said the exercise was a great opportunity for the nursing students to work collaboratively with medical students.

'It enabled student nurses to experience a taste of being responsible for clinical decision making in the real clinical world,' she said.