The Benefits of CaRE
Find out how CaRE can support your students’ Cardio-Respiratory examination skills training in this article.
Physical examination skills are fundamental to quality patient care and are often taught early in student training.
The Cardiovascular and Respiratory Examination (CaRE) trainer from Limbs & Things brings a new dimension to learning via simulation. With patent-pending technology, it offers life-like patient representation to simultaneously replicate heart and lung sounds, as well as pulses and breathing movements.
In the classroom, simulated patients are commonly used when learning the skills of physical examination. Whilst effective for students to recognise the signs and sounds associated with normal, healthy cases, it fails to consider the more extreme abnormalities that are also important to identify and diagnose.
Unlike simulated patients, CaRE considers both normal and abnormal conditions, introducing students to pathologies underrepresented within simulated learning. Using CaRE in practice, trainees can build recognition across a variety of cases to develop confidence and skill accuracy during examinations.
This has been reinforced by students when talking about their current learning process. When Estelle, an Undergraduate Medical Student, practiced cardio-respiratory examinations in class, she was left feeling “underprepared to identify serious complications, as we have had no hands-on experience with this”.
“I think myself and many of my cohort feel that as students we are very confident with our theoretical knowledge of rare clinical conditions, but having had no practical way to test this means that I would feel out of my depth on real patients."
CaRE provides a unique training experience, replicating over 30 clinical cases that range from common to infrequent emergencies, such as sepsis or decompensated heart failure. Cases are built from valid and accurate combinations of heart & lung sounds, pulses, and chest rise & fall; these are synchronised together for full representative simulation during complex and advanced scenarios.
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