The UPMC Jameson Health Care Foundation was proud to support a cross-departmental team of healthcare professionals at UPMC Jameson on Wednesday, October 30th as they hosted the 3rd Annual Robotics Day. The hospital welcomed more than 300 students from 13 different schools in Lawrence and Mercer County for a behind-the-scenes look at a hospital’s daily operations, including the surgical robots in use at UPMC Jameson.
During their day at the hospital, students had the opportunity to interact with a variety of healthcare professionals across a number of hospital disciplines, including respiratory care, imaging, nursing, infomatics, anesthesia, surgery, human resources, and infection prevention, among others. Participants were given a chance to tour an operating room, interact with equipment used by surgical and patient care teams, and learn about potential career opportunities in a hospital setting.
This year’s event was planned and hosted by a group of approximately 40 volunteers from across the hospital. “UPMC Jameson is part of our bigger community,” said Pam DeVincentis, Unit Director, Peri-Anesthesia at UPMC Jameson. “The goal of Robotics Day is to open our doors to local students to engage them by showing them some of what happens in the medical world. We want to empower them to explore, choose and ultimately succeed in our community as future healthcare workers.”
UPMC Jameson hosts several surgical robots used for surgical procedures performed in Lawrence County, including the da Vinci Surgical System and the Mako Robotic Arm-Assisted surgical robot. Students were given the opportunity not only to hear from the surgical teams who utilize the equipment, but also to experience the robots with a hands-on demonstration that provided a surgeons-eye view of a mock surgical procedure.
Students were also able to see the hospital’s Victoria Doll childbirth simulator, a cutting-edge training device used to train labor and delivery healthcare professionals to handle a variety of childbirth scenarios and ailments.
A new addition to this year’s Robotics Day was the opportunity for students to try the hospital’s new virtual reality nursing training system, which utilizes headsets and specialized software from SimX to place students in a virtual hospital room to train them in a variety of routine and emergency scenarios. This system is the first virtual reality system in use for training within the UPMC system and was provided for the hospital by a grant from the UPMC Jameson Foundation and the Caroline Fredricka Holdship Charitable Trust.
“My favorite part of Robotics Day is to see the students from our local communities coming into our facility, many of them without a point of reference for all of the career opportunities in healthcare that they could pursue,” said Michele Albaugh, a Nurse Educator at Jameson who provides training through the VR system.
“Throughout the day they get to engage with a wide variety of healthcare professionals that are experts in their field, and it’s exciting to me to know that I could see some of these same students back wearing a UPMC name badge in five to ten years because we ignited a spark in them at this event.”
Students had the chance to talk to UPMC Jameson’s Human Resources team to learn more about hospital career paths, as well as representatives from the UPMC Jameson School of Nursing in New Castle. In addition to giving students a look at how a hospital operates, Robotics Day seeks to excite and engage future healthcare professionals – some of whom may someday come back to work at Jameson.
