CSSALT is working with colleagues from the UF Departments of Anesthesiology and Surgery to design and build a task trainer for practicing open chest cardiac massage.
On rare occasions, open cardiac massage may be performed in the Intensive Care Unit on patients who have recently had a sternotomy and are in cardiac arrest. Since open cardiac massage is not a commonly performed procedure, intensivists and ICU staff may be hesitant to perform it and are potentially unfamiliar with the equipment necessary or available.
Unfortunately, open cardiac massage simulators are scarce, expensive to obtain, require the ongoing purchase of relatively high-cost consumables for continued use and give no quantitative feedback. Likewise, there is a scarcity and high cost associated with the use of cadavers for such training and practice. Therefore, we are designing and building a low cost, easy to produce and sufficiently realistic simulation task trainer to help fill this gap.