The health innovation center looks to the future of the NHS while celebrating the past
Inside a full-size model of a house, a £50,000 mannequin, which can breathe, blink and cough, waits for the replica of an ambulance.
Eeriely lifelike technology, some of it created by model makers who created ‘bodies’ for the BBC’s Silent Witness, is being used to tackle the scarcity of internship hours for healthcare students by combining real-world training with simulated settings , including virtual reality.
“We can inject them and they will respond. We can collapse and intubate the lungs, the lips will cyanose (turn blue-purple) as they deteriorate, and we can perform CPR in exactly the same way as a real patient,” says Kevin Riley, technical services manager at the National Health Service. Innovation Center (NHIC), for human patient simulations.
Yorkshire and the Humber have the highest levels in overweight peoplethe the second highest mortality rate at a young age and the third lowest life expectancy in England.
The NHIC, at the University of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, aims to alleviate workforce shortages in the NHS while tackling inequality and boosting regeneration.
The center points to the future of the NHS while celebrating its past: the first building to open, which will house state-of-the-art simulations, is named after Britain’s first black matron, Daphne Steele.
Steele, who was born in Guyana and died aged 76 in 2004, joins other West Yorkshire celebrities – there is a Barbara Hepworth Building and a Harold Wilson Roundabout – celebrated at the university.
The NHIC, which will comprise seven buildings when completed, will attract patients and provide practitioners to a population of seven million people, from South Yorkshire to Greater Manchester.
One specialty has been described as ‘guerrilla healthcare’, where health checks take place in unexpected places – from cricket pitches to community events – rather than waiting for people to come to services, says Dr Sara Eastburn, who heads the allied health professions department.
Meanwhile, patients have access to student-run clinics, supervised by experienced professionals, in a location built to the highest sustainability standards and also home to start-ups, giving them access to cutting-edge facilities such as PEEK 3D printers, project leader Liz Towns- says Andries.
The ‘community center’ in the Daphne Steele building can be used to recreate traumatic scenes so that trainee doctors, police and social workers can experience them in a controlled environment. Mannequins range from pediatric to bariatric models.
Nurses, paramedics and podiatrists are just some of the practitioners needed as the NHS battles staff shortages, an aging workforce and poor retention rates.
Huddersfield has an advantage over other training centers because the proportion of students with strong local links – including a much higher proportion of working-class white men than average – means the skills acquired here are more likely to benefit the area, says Tim Thornton , the Vice-Chancellor, describing the NHIC as “one of the most exciting projects in the North of England”.
Robert Steele, 60, a math teacher and son of the woman whose legacy the NHIC honors, said it was a fitting tribute.
His mother joined the NHS in 1955 and worked as a deputy matron at Whalley Range, south Manchester, before becoming matron of Saint Winifred’s hospital in Ilkley in 1964, making headlines around the world. Robert remembers making Ilkley Moor his playground, the letters his mother would receive from all over the world – addressed simply to ‘Daphne Steele, Ilkley’ – and how they couldn’t get to the end of the street without are greeted by ‘grateful’ parents.
“Sixty years later, people still talk about (Daphne),” he said. “That speaks volumes – that this is a legacy that means so much to people, a recognition of the contribution that not only Daphne, but others of her generation have made to the NHS.”