In a full-scale model of a house, a £50,000 mannequin that can breathe, blink and cough waits for the replica of an ambulance.
Eerily lifelike technology, some created by model makers who have made “bodies” for the BBC’s Silent Witness, is being used to tackle the scarcity of placement hours for healthcare students by combining real-world training with simulated settings, including virtual reality.
“We can inject them and they will react. We can collapse lungs and intubate them, the lips will cyanose [go bluish-purple] if they deteriorate, and we can resuscitate in exactly the same way we would a real patient,” says Kevin Riley, a technical services manager at the National Health Innovation Centre (NHIC), of human patient simulations.
Yorkshire and the Humber has the highest levels of overweight people, the second-highest rate of death in infancy and the third-lowest life-expectancy in England.
The NHIC, at the University of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, wants to ease staff shortages in the NHS while tackling inequalities and driving regeneration.
The centre points to the future of the NHS while celebrating its past – the first building to open, which contains the cutting-edge simulations, is named after Britain’s first black matron, Daphne Steele.
Steele, who was born in Guyana and who died age 76 in 2004, joins other West Yorkshire luminaries – there’s a Barbara Hepworth building and a Harold Wilson roundabout – celebrated at the university.
The NHIC, which will span seven buildings when complete, will draw patients from and provide practitioners to a population of seven million, from South Yorkshire to Greater Manchester.
One specialism is described as “guerrilla healthcare” involving health checks in unexpected places – from cricket grounds to community events – rather than waiting for people to come to services, says Dr Sara Eastburn, who leads the department of allied health professions.
Meanwhile, patients can access student-led clinics, overseen by experienced professionals, on a site built to the highest sustainability standards that also houses start-ups, giving them access to cutting-edge facilities such as PEEK 3D printers, project lead Liz Towns-Andrews says.
The “community house” at the Daphne Steele building can be used to replicate traumatic scenes so that trainee medics, police and social workers can experience them in a controlled environment. Mannequins vary from the paediatric to the bariatric.
Nurses, paramedics and podiatrists are just some practitioners needed as the NHS battles staff shortages, an ageing workforce and poor retention rates.
Huddersfield enjoys an advantage over other training centres because the proportion of students who have strong local ties – including a much larger number of white working-class males than average – means skills acquired here are more likely to benefit the area, says Tim Thornton, the deputy vice-chancellor, who describes the NHIC as “one of the most exciting projects in the north of England”.
Robert Steele, 60, a maths tutor and the son of the woman whose legacy the NHIC honours, said it was a fitting tribute.
His mother came to work in the NHS in 1955, working as a deputy matron in Whalley Range, south Manchester, before becoming matron of Saint Winifred’s hospital in Ilkley in 1964, making headlines globally. Robert remembers making Ilkley Moor his playground, the letters his mother would receive from around the world – addressed simply to ‘Daphne Steele, Ilkley’ – and that they could not get to the end of the street without being greeted by “grateful” parents.
“Sixty years on, and people are still talking about [Daphne],” he said. “That speaks volumes – that this is a legacy that means so much to people, an acknowledgment of the contribution not just Daphne, but others of her generation made to the NHS.”
