The Gynecology and Obstetrics Service at the Quirónsalud San José Hospital, in collaboration with Universidad Europea, has designed labor simulations aimed at students in the sixth year of the medicine degree in order to ensure that they will be prepared to face deliveries with the best guarantees.
Each simulation, in which four professionals and one student participate, lasts an average of 20 minutes. In this time, a patient who wants to give birth without an epidural (primipara or multipara, depending on the simulation) and who has arrived at the hospital in the first phase of advanced labor is able to become fully dilated and have a very realistic second phase of labor.
In terms of how the action develops, the student, who is acting as the gynecology and obstetrics resident, receives a call in which he or she is asked to go to the delivery room because there is a patient who is ready to push who has been admitted directly to delivery. In this situation, the student goes to a simulated delivery room in the facilities of the School of Biomedical and Health Sciences at Universidad Europea. Here, he/she will have to obtain the most important information from the patient's history and care for the patient, applying both the theory they have learned, as well as transmitting the calm and respect the situation requires.
In this exercise, there is simultaneous action: an obstetrician acts as the patent's companion while recording all the necessary details to correct and improve the student's skills; meanwhile, a second obstetrician supervises the “resident” while acting as the on-call attending physician. Furthermore, a technician monitors the evolution of the birth, the contractions, and fetal monitoring. A fourth professional, in this case a volunteer professor from the Universidad Europea, plays the electronic role of the woman in labor, observing the situation, listening to the conversation, and taking into consideration the progression of labor. The simulation ends with the birth, attended to by one of the obstetricians, and a group discussion where the different aspects to improve are discussed.