AndrewRN

The CHARLIE project culminated in Exercise Iron Heart at the U of A hospital.  In two words, "It worked."  As far as anyone connected with the project can find, no one has done a mannequin-based graft-failure scenario involving reoperative sternotomy, emergency cannulation, and cardiopulmonary bypass before.  We had nurses, respiratory therapists, surgery residents, and perfusionists as fully-blinded participant learners; four disciplines blind is a pretty big deal in medical simulation. Of course, for CHARLIE to be really useful, he needs to be more than a one-trick training aid, and now there's no shortage of people telling me the just-one

"Flow control" is, uhm, well, not EVERYTHING in life, but it's sure important.  Just ask any middle-aged guy, or his urologist. I've spent this past vacation working on the flow control hardware and software for the patient-side flow control, and it's AALLL-MMOST ready to test.  Well, working off and on; you know how vacations can be.  So much metal, so little time to heat it orange and hit it with a hammer. I head back to my day job tomorrow, and the first big chance to run a live test is with a hemodialysis simulation using real units of red cells in saline and anticoagulant.

The "Big red and big blue" prototype made a few people happy; maybe it'd have been easy for all you smart pricks out there who already know about in-camera special effects, but I'm learning as I go.  Next step is to get a heart and lungs built around it, and cram it all inside the torso of the poor old dead HPS. We named that machine CHARLIE (for the Capital Health Advanced Resuscitation Learning Immersive Environment, and for Charlie Reid, dead these twenty-some years of his first MI) when we installed it in 2005.  We threw out most of the guts-- but in the shell, CHARLIE's heart will beat on.