UTA receives funding to construct Smart Hospital

The University of Texas at Arlington recently received $500,000 to begin construction on a new 15,000-square-foot building for Smart Hospital, a simulation-learning center for graduate and undergraduate nursing students. The date construction will begin and where the hospital will be on the UTA campus have yet to be announced, but the building could open in the fall.

The Smart Hospital program, now offered in other space within UTA School of Nursing, uses 27 manikins – simulated patients – programmed to present various health-care problems. Funding for the construction project comes from The University of Texas System ENTER program. ENTER is known more formally as Enrich Nursing Through Exceptional Recruitment.

The ENTER program, which began in October, addresses the continuing shortage of well-educated nurses in the state by allowing more students to receive nursing education. About 4,200 qualified nursing applicants in Texas in 2004 could not be accommodated because of faculty shortages, according to state figures. Institutions must hire one full-time nursing instructor for every 10 additional nursing students in a program.

“[This funding] will allow us to retain current [faculty] and recruit new faculty whose interests and scholarship are based on using simulation in nursing and multidisciplinary education, research and development of new products,” said Elizabeth Poster, dean of UTA’s School of Nursing “The Smart Hospital is a virtual hospital setting that uses technology to structure clinical-learning experiences in ways that ensure our students will to be better prepared upon graduation to safely care for patients.

“By showing simulation as a valid and reliable strategy that allows students to progress at their own rates outside traditional semester constraints, the School of Nursing will have data to make major changes in health-care education and ultimately increase enrollment and graduation rates.”

The new grant will be combined with $150,000 received from the Amon G. Carter Foundation in December. The investments will provide support for the construction of the facility and the purchase of equipment to be housed within it.

The building will provide space for more than 650 students to evaluate and treat simulated emergency and primary care patients in an educational setting.

A prescription for trouble?

Brochures produced by pharmaceutical companies to promote their drugs to physicians donÂ’t always present accurate data, according to researchers at The University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth.

In a new article published in the journal BMC Family Practice, Drs. Roberto Cardarelli, assistant professor of family medicine, and John C. Licciardone, professor and director of clinical research for the Osteopathic Research Center at the health science center, found differing degrees of accuracy in 20 brochures from 20 separate drug companies. They found three out of 20 promotional brochures studied contained data different from that in the original studies on the effects of the drugs.

The exact brochures studied were not immediately available.

Although the differences were small, Cardarelli and Licciardone recommend physicians review the original studies instead of changing their drug-prescribing behaviors based on promotional brochures.

“Further research is needed in this area,” Cardarelli said. “The next step is to better understand and determine if pharmaceutical promotional products change a physician’s prescribing habits. More importantly, if it does, we must ensure that the information is accurate.”

Cardarelli and his colleagues asked physicians in five clinics to collect the promotional brochures that they received from pharmaceutical companies. The brochures representing 20 different drugs were collected from October to December 2004 and the original corresponding studies were obtained.

“The research and service that pharmaceutical companies provide is imperative in the development of new medications that treat and cure disease,” Cardarelli said. “As we found, the quality of most studies was excellent. Nonetheless, we must be aware that ethical obligations and business are two different things. We must ensure that one does not influence the other.”

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