Teaming up to train healthcare professionals

Dräger Medical South Africa and the Clinical Skill Centre at The University of Cape Town (UCT) are celebrating a unique partnership, with the launch of the newly renovated Simulation Laboratory in Cape Town.

Simulation training provides opportunities for students to gain technical competency in procedural skills before they reach the patient. It also allows teams to practise their communication skills and protocols for crisis situations, such as resuscitations.

This type of training does not come cheap, however, and ever-shrinking higher education budgets limit the scope of what can be taught.

The UCT Clinical Skills Centre saw an opportunity to expand its relationship with Dräger, which has been built over many years. The resulting private-public partnership, one of the first of its kind in South Africa, resulted in the completion of a state-of-the-art Simulation Laboratory in the old Main Building in Groote Schuur Hospital.

Apart from the installation and maintenance of Dräger medical equipment, to the value of over R10 million, the partnership involves building learning networks and creating training opportunities across public and private healthcare institutions. The Centre’s director, Rachel Weiss, believes that formalising partnerships can provide benefits to all parties, while maintaining transparency and ethical standards.

The Centre caters for undergraduate and postgraduate UCT students in medicine, nursing and the health and rehabilitation sciences. The collaboration also enables healthcare workers, already working in intensive-care units and other clinical settings in the Western Cape, to attend updates on topics such as mechanical ventilation, and to practise using the equipment in case-based scenarios.