The University Campus Bohunice will expand with a simulation centre for medical students, laboratories and a RECETOX biobank as well as a sports hall.
The construction of the state-of-the-art simulation centre (SIMU) for training future physicians and other healthcare professionals officially commenced today with representatives of the university and contractors laying the symbolic foundation stone. The new building should be open for students in the 2020/2021 academic year.
The simulation centre of the MU Faculty of Medicine will be a unique place serving the needs of practical training for students of medicine. The low-energy five-storey building will include a simulation of an actual hospital environment with an emergency department with beds and a fully equipped dummy ambulance, a surgical department with two operating theatres, intensive care rooms, and ordinary hospital rooms.
The individual rooms will be equipped with training dummies, trainers, and simulators imitating real-life situations which doctors can expect to find themselves in. Moreover, there will be technology that can record the simulations so that teachers can analyse and evaluate them later with their students. In this way, students will have the opportunity to perfect both common and complicated interventions in a safe environment.
“The whole project will have a significant impact on the current and future education of medical students. The simulation centre will be unique not only in how comprehensive it is but also in that it brings the most state-of-the-art features of simulation medicine into students’ everyday schedule,” said Petr Štourač, the director of the new centre.
Martin Bareš, the dean of the Faculty of Medicine at MU, expects that the simulation centre will transform and modernise teaching. “The new building will transform the campus, and not only from a design perspective – thanks to the new teaching methods and changes in clinical training, the Faculty of Medicine at MU will become a unique centre of medical education not only in the Czech Republic but also in the whole of Central Europe,” said Bareš.
The building will stand next to the recently built office for South-Moravian paramedics. It will have an area of 8,000 m² and the costs of the construction and equipment for the centre will be close to one billion Czech crowns. The construction of this centre is part of the Strategic Education Investment Project (SIMU+) at Masaryk University funded from the Operational Programme Research, Development and Education.
This autumn, another construction will start next to the pavilion of the Research Centre for Toxic Compounds in the Environment (RECETOX), creating space for new laboratories and, most importantly, a biobank. This will be used for storing samples of blood and other bodily fluids from large groups of people participating in the long-term monitoring of the impact of the environment on humans. This facility makes it possible to study the influence of the environment in all its complexity and examine its role in the development of chronic diseases.
“We are going to look for biomarkers of early signs of chronic diseases, which can be used for early diagnosis and prevention of diseases in the future," says centre Director Jana Klánová.
The biobank and the new laboratories will be ready in about two years’ time and medical students will have to wait until the 2020/2021 academic year for their new teaching centre. In three years’ time, there should also be a new city sports hall on the Bohunice campus. Masaryk University is a partner in this project, as the hall will be used by athletes and students from the Faculty of Sports Studies as well as other faculties.