Harvey, the handsome heart-throb cardiac-simulator, who is teaching medical students skills in clinical practice, launches his website this week allowing medical students all over the UK to swap ideas on the best way to use Harvey to hone their clinical skills.
Last year the British Heart Foundation invested over £1 million to give every medical school in the UK a cardiology patient simulator. Now, launched from the £120,000 British Heart Foundation Harvey Resource Centre at the University of Dundee, Harvey's website will be available to all UK medical schools enabling students and staff to refer to and share best practice with other medical students in different universities around the country. This will be facilitated through the use of the websites forum, where Harvey users can discuss issues relating to the simulator and UMedic computer programme.
Harvey co-ordinators hope that students and tutors will use the site to share teaching and learning materials and create a community of Harveyusers. The site www.harveyresourcecentre.org.uk includes a technical manual, guides on the different aspects of using the simulator and computer programme, and a bibliography of articles about Harvey.
The University of Dundee was the first University in the UK to use the cardiology patient simulator which was developed by Professor Michael Gordon at the University of Miami. Professor Gordon was in Dundee last month to receive an honorary degree from the University.
Dr Stuart Pringle, Cardiologist and co-director of the centre along with Dr Shihab Khogali and colleague Professor Ronald Harden said: "Harvey is an extremely useful teaching tool which helps medical students study cardiology in a novel and very practical way. Harvey can mimic 27 different heart conditions giving the students "hands-on" clinical experience on the simulator before transferring their skills to the examination of real patients. Amongst other clinical skills the students can practise taking the pulse, measuring blood pressure and listening to a variety of heart murmurs all accurately reproduced.
Dr Shihab Khogali, co-director of the centre will be giving a presentation on the progress of the Harvey Resource Centre at the annual meeting of Association of Medical Education in Europe (AMEE), which will be held from 31st August - 3rd September in Bern.
The University of Dundee's medical school was recently found to be the best in the UK in preparing student doctors for medical practice according to a national survey conducted by researchers in Oxford.
By Jenny Marra, Head of Press 01382 344910 j.m.marra@dundee.ac.uk