A UK university has introduced what is believed to be the world's first overweight manikin for medical students in response to the rising obesity rates in England.
The manikin, developed by Aston University and modelled on an overweight woman, aims to provide patients with more dignity by equipping medics with the skills to better treat larger individuals, BirminghamLive reports. The university explained manikins traditionally used for training are slim but procedures such as CPR, intubation, and catheterisation could be more challenging on overweight patients. The innovative design was the idea of a professor who wanted a more "realistic" manikin.
The new model, named R42, features an internal skeleton for a more realistic feel, helping students learn how to care for and move larger patients. Recent NHS England statistics showed 63.8% of adults in England are overweight, with 25.9% classified as obese.
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Prof Liz Moores, deputy dean of the College of Health and Life Sciences, came up with the idea and reached out to Jacob Rahman from healthcare tech firm Simulation Man to make the dummy. Mr Rahman reckons R42 is the first realistic overweight training dummy in the world.
"Lots of patients are overweight so it's useful to have experience with overweight patients," Prof Moores said. "As a female obese manikin, this manikin also has large breasts."
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"We want our students to know how to resuscitate people irrespective of body type. Whilst diversity in manikins has already extended to skin tone, age and more recently certain disabilities, there are no realistic looking and feeling obese manikins available in the UK. The development of R42 is really important."
R42 was officially unveiled at the Association for Simulated Practice in Healthcare conference in Brighton this year. The first dummy will be introduced at Aston University for students before the end of the year, with another one coming in early 2024.
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