Sory here. This sounds like the plot of a porn movie, but apparently it’s for real. Two former medical students are suing a Florida college, because part of the training included having to receive weekly vaginal ultrasounds from their classmates, including at least one male student. And they were supposedly threatened with lower grades when they complained to their professor.
Apparently it’s SOP in nursing schools for students to practice various procedures on each other.
They weren’t medical students (studying to be physicians). They were vocational students studying to get certified to perform this particular procedure. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they should have been coerced in the way that they allege happened.
Dr. Ball told one of the patients during a probe that she was “sexy” and would make a good “escort girl."
She needs to work on her bedside manner.
A trans-vaginal ultrasound involves having a dildo-like transducer stuck up your vagina. If it’s done professionally, and there’s a good reason for it (I had one early in pregnancy, when an abdominal ultrasound can’t pick up anything), it’s no worse than any other procedure-- it’s more comfortable than having a sample taken for a Pap smear.
But if a woman is a virgin, I suppose it could be really uncomfortable, and if a woman has ever been sexually assaulted, it could stir up a lot of bad feelings. Also, no one wants to get “volunteered” while she has her period, so when someone gets to be the Guinea pig should be entirely the choice even of a willing subject. It really ought to be entirely voluntary.
I understand using other people as “practice dummies.” We did this in basic training when we did first aid, and we even did it as candy stripers, when we learned how to assist a nurse in changing bedsheets in an occupied bed, but none of it was invasive (and anything we did as candy stripers was voluntary).
The one time I had to practice an invasive procedure, it was giving an insulin shot. We used saline solution, and had to give a shot to ourselves. One person had some kind of problem with sodium balance (I don’t remember what it was, but apparently she had to be really, really careful with her diet, including measuring her liquid intake), said she didn’t want to do it, and the nurse who gave the class volunteered to be her practice dummy, and passed her on the class. It was pretty brave of the nurse, if you ask me. Another time, when I participated in an insulin workshop, which was training people who already knew how to use syringes to use a pen, they all had to inject a grapefruit.
Just my two cents that I understand the necessity for having people to practice on, but anything invasive ought to be voluntary.
I graduated nursing school in 2011, and the number of procedures they would allow us to practice on each other was…frighteningly low. We couldn’t do blood draws or IV placements, for example, because lawyers. We couldn’t do them on each other *or *on patients, which means our first time using catheters was after graduation, working as nurses on actual patients. A few of us got to place NG tubes and do suctioning of trached patients as students, but not even close to most of us. I was the only one in my graduating class who placed a Foley, because the day I spent in the ER, my teacher was on another floor with the rest of my class, and the ancient nurse I was shadowing thought it stupid that I’d never get to do it. She watched me like a hawk, of course, and it was actually very easy, but my teacher flipped her lid when she found out.
We had dummies in the “Skills Lab” that we weren’t allowed to use because they were so expensive we might damage them. Instead of actually placing an IV in these expensive androids designed for just that, we would pantomime what we *would *do outside the “skin,” for which we might as well have been using Barbie dolls. The only time they were used as designed was when the Surgeon General of the US made a visit to our school, and a handpicked group of students who were already paramedics (and thus had done this stuff on real people already) were chosen to show off our awesome Skills Lab that we never actually used.
Most of us hated how little practical skill training we got. We *wanted *to practice on each other, and we were not allowed to.
I heard somewhere that nurses practice by injecting oranges. Do they do that?
Regards,
Shodan
A nurse friend taught me how to place an IV like that, but not at school. It really has limited usefulness. There’s no vein to hit, no blood that comes rushing out if you forget to release the tourniquet, no moving patient or rolling veins. It’s good for learning how to advance the catheter off the needle and how to apply the tegaderm and tape to secure the site, and to help you get over the EEK! NEEDLE! emotional part, but that’s about it. It’s not really anything like putting an IV in a person.
For injections, it’s nice for teaching a person to aim past the skin so the needle actually goes in, but, again, it doesn’t act or feel like a person.
Nothing, not even the expensive medical models, will really replace a human body to practice on.
My dentist told me that when they had to practice novocaine injections on each other in dental school, they had to pair off and take turns at the front of the class, while the other students all chanted, “SHOT! SHOT! SHOT!”