France: Nîmes Regional University Hospital

The AREVA corporate Foundation has joined forces with the Nîmes Regional University Hospital to expand the skills of health workers attending to women and their infants.

Computer-programmed mannequins

The training center brings together different medical and surgical specialties and offers all available techniques including interactive, life-like mannequins, which simulate complex situations and scenarios designed by the trainers.

Drills are used to assess the skills but also the emotional capital of all participants in emergency scenarios. Already, some eighty health professionals benefitted from the program in 2013 and the goal is to train 400 participants every year.

A leading hospital center

The Nîmes Regional University Hospital receives more than 120,000 patients every year. In 2007, the hospital launched an ambitious development program including the deployment of a medical simulation center.

With multidisciplinary simulation training, the medical team is able to test its operations and its decision-making processes based on the ethical principle that no procedure should be learned on a patient.

In 2013, the hospital inaugurated the University Hospital Medical Simulation Center (SIMUH). This center of excellence for health professions is open to all practitioners and medical students who need to train or acquire highly specialized skills without risk to patients.

Training for better care to mothers and their infants

The training program offered to obstetrics and neonatal practitioners uses computer-programmed mannequins in operating or delivery room conditions. Their bodies react to the moves practiced by medical students, nurses, midwives and doctors in training.

The AREVA corporate Foundation funded the purchase of two of these mannequins, a pregnant woman and her newborn, for training in the fields of gynecology and vital care to the newborn.

A computer-programmed mannequin that acts like a newborn
In 2016, the Foundation chose to finance the acquisition of a latest generation of newborn mannequin. This mannequin's movements and reactions immediately immerse the medical personnel in a near-reality situation.