There’s No Place Like Home

The Emory Nursing Learning Center affords faculty and students with something they’ve never had before: a lab for learning how to care for patients in their homes.

Learning to care for patients in the home, nursing experts believe, provides a deeper understanding of how various factors — loneliness, access to nutritious food, mental health, and other social determinants of health — can impact their lives. The CenterWell Home Health Lab will expose students to the complexities of home health nursing. 

“With this lab, students will receive valuable experience to prepare them for practice and perhaps inspire them to start a career in home health,” says Kathy Driscoll, vice president and chief nursing officer at Humana. 

Located on the learning center’s second level, the home lab has a combined living room, dining room, and kitchen, and a bedroom and bath. Each room has an observation room for faculty. 

Students will work with manikins and standardized patients in the apartment while instructors and classmates observe from a debriefing room next door. A telehealth and simulation office, located nearby, will allow students to engage in simulated remote consults — a part of home health nursing that proved critically important during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

During telehealth scenarios, pre-licensure students in the apartment will consult with post-licensure students and faculty in the telehealth office. Students can also use telehealth technology to provide simulated remote patient monitoring such as blood pressure, blood glucose, and heart rate. 

The CenterWell Home Health Lab, the largest of its kind in Georgia, will expose students to a variety of possible scenarios: an elderly man transitioning home following a heart attack, a young girl with asthma, a teenage boy with autism, a new mother who delivered her baby by C-section and is learning to breastfeed, a 30-something man on home chemotherapy, and a 50-something woman receiving end-of-life care. 

“Home health care is not just about patients who transition from acute care in the hospital,” says assistant clinical professor Quyen Phan, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC, who provided feedback in the design of the home lab. “It’s about patients who receive ongoing care.” 

“The home lab will help our students think about nursing practice outside the four walls of a hospital,” Phan adds. “It will provide them with the skills, knowledge, and competencies they need when they aren’t in total control in the hospital. They will learn how to deliver care in the home, where patients spend most of their lives.”