To better represent different patient types, manikins and suture pads used for medical training have been diversified in skin color shades and body types. Credit: Courtesy of Serena Smith
College of Medicine students can now train as doctors using manikins and suture pads that better resemble patients with different skin colors and body types.
Sheryl Pfeil, medical director of the Clinical Skills Education and Assessment Center, said manikins often used in medical simulations at Ohio State only represented a single demographic, which is why using diverse equipment can help prepare students to treat real patients of all sizes and skin tones.
“One is making sure that the experiences that we bring to our students are authentic, and they represent the experiences they will have and care for patients from the population wherever they practice,” Pfeil said.
Jordan Haber, a second-year in the College of Medicine, said he recognized this disparity and participated in bringing this issue to the administration to acquire a diverse selection of training equipment for students.
Haber said it’s important for medical students to have training equipment that looks like them. He said he participated in producing the suture pads of color as an undergraduate at Michigan State because of the lack of medical equipment that resembled him as an Afro-Caribbean student.
“It’s been an incredible experience to be able to not only see them firsthand but to hear about them being used by other groups and then relaying to me how nice it was to have the same experience that I had,” Haber said.
James Read, associate director of the CSEAC, said his role in administration has allowed him to work with manufacturers to bring new manikins to students in training that accurately represent a diverse patient population.
“Historically, manufacturers have made predominantly white male appearing devices, with one notable exception, and that is that there were female manikins for the purpose of labor and delivery simulation,” Read said. “There wasn’t any real pressure for the past couple of decades on the manufacturers to really provide more than that.”
Read said incoming students will now have the opportunity to constantly work with diverse equipment as one of the College of Medicine’s efforts to promote inclusivity.
“We want to make sure that we are a selling point for the university and for the students, in that they come in, and they say ‘I’m having experiences where I can see people like me as part of this experience where I can reflect on the fact that I’m serving a community that includes myself, my family, my friends,’” Read said.
Pfeil said this initiative also addresses the hidden curriculum — lessons not often learned but practiced — in the medical field where there is a disconnect in the goals and what is actually exercised.
“If we speak to caring for all patients and then all we present is a very uniform set of manikins, or even the arm where they place the IVs or the torsos where they perform intubation, if all we present is something that is not what we’re saying, there’s a disconnect there,” Pfeil said.
Haber said he is optimistic the inclusivity the manikins and suture pads of color will bring to medical training will soon become the normal practice.
“I can only imagine how I would have felt if I got to Ohio State and I went to the clinical skills center and saw suture pads and manikins that looked like me,” Haber said. “I’m really happy that moving forward, students, hopefully, will be able to not go through those hardships.”
