STUDENTS learn from their mistakes, but making mistakes on live patients is a big no-no when it comes to doctors-to-be.
A new simulated hospital, complete with rooms that look like wards, an intensive care unit and an operating theatre, will give medical and nursing students that chance to be corrected - and for them to learn from their mistakes - even before they step near a live patient, said Associate Professor Chen Fun Gee.
Patients will thus benefit from better care, the head of anaesthesia at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine said.
This new addition will be situated inside the $180-million Centre for Translational Medicine, which held its groundbreaking ceremony yesterday, with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong as guest-of-honour.
Prof Chen uses "simulators" - mannequins that "breathe", have pulses and can simulate medical conditions like heart attacks - to teach medical students acute medicine.
When the simulated hospital in the new building is ready in second-half 2010, it will have 15 simulators, so students can train more intensively.
Instead of learning separately within their cohorts, medical and nursing students will also train together in teams, said the dean, Professor John Wong.
This will be more beneficial as "in a real-life, hospital setting, it's a multi-disciplinary approach", said fourth-year medical student Tang Yee Lin, 24.
"This way, you can learn as a group, and by the time you graduate, you know how each other work," she said.
Ten floors of the 15-storey building, including the basement, will house research laboratories, including a new Biosafety Level 3 laboratory.
By bringing together clinicians, scientists and students to work together, sharing knowledge and patient observations and data under the same roof, the new centre will "turn out better health-care professionals", as well as give patients "access to trials, better drugs, better care", said Prof Wong.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who officiated at the ceremony, said that such links among research institutions, hospitals and medical schools was how world-class centres like Johns Hopkins "maintain their pre-eminence".
He said: "Such integrated set-ups make it easier for clinicians and researchers to collaborate across disciplines and across hospital-school lines."
