Student-built simulator will help B.C. kids

VICTORIA, BC – Not many college students can say they designed and built a functioning piece of hospital equipment, but a few soon-to-be grads on Vancouver Island have done just that.

The group of Camosun College engineering students dedicated some 5,000 hours over three-and-a-half months into working on a pediatric MRI simulator, Global News reported.

The simulator served as the students’ capstone project.

Soon, the simulator – which looks, sounds and feels like a real MRI machine – will be put to work in Victoria General Hospital’s pediatric unit, where it will help kids mentally prepare for what can be a scary procedure.

“We are all pretty proud of what we have been able to accomplish here in this short amount of time, and glad to be able to help out those kids,” engineering student Dylan Snyder said.

“Coming in and seeing the actual effect this will have on people, it’s a good feeling,” added classmate Sam Lloyd.

Becki Steel, child-life practice lead at Victoria General Hospital, said the new tool will provide benefits both for young patients who frequently face stress or anxiety when receiving an MRI scan, and for MRI wait times overall.

“It’s a very large number of kids who need to learn about the MRI in a kind of playful and structured way before coming in for their real one, and it can make a pretty big difference,” she said.

The hospital’s current practice is to sedate all children aged eight and under before a scan because very few of them can get into the machine and stay inside alone for the length of time it takes to complete a scan.

“Even for the kids eight to 10 age, we have a number of failures, which means that they come in, they try and do their scan without sedation and they aren’t able to cope with it, and so the scan is cancelled and then they have to be rebooked with sedation, which adds a number of months to the waitlist,” she said.

With the simulator now in place, young patients who are currently on the sedation wait list and who look like good candidates for the program will be invited in for a practice MRI.

Staff will practice each of the steps of the procedure with children, and if the simulated test goes well, they can book an MRI without sedation – sometimes as early as that same week.