LOCUST GROVE Va.

Increasingly, students in the medical field can learn to tend to patients before setting foot in a hospital.

At Germanna Community College, human-patient simulators create scenarios for nursing students to address with little intervention from instructors: an infant who overdosed on fluids, a diabetic with excessive blood-sugar levels and a postoperative patient anxious to go home, for example.

"It has really revolutionized, truly integrated technology in the academic setting," said Judy Woolcock, nursing lab coordinator.

Germanna's nursing program is among several in the country that use human-patient simulators in some capacity in conjunction with clinicals and lectures. Health care professionals say this technique allows students more autonomy.

The college used its first human-patient simulator in the summer of 2004, and has spent $418,000 on simulators and software.

The virtual hospital at the Locust Grove campus now uses 10 high-fidelity human-patient simulators equipped with basic human functions. They breathe, blink and sweat.

"They can pretty much do anything we want them to do," Woolcock said. "It's just a matter of creativity and the time that we set up for it."

Nursing students often get so involved with cases they no longer see them as simulators, Woolcock said. Students even cry when their "patients" die.

On a recent morning, nursing instructor Patricia Lisk watched the adult ward through a window in a small room within the classroom. She used computers to control patients' functions and monitored the room with a camera.

In addition to being an instructor, Lisk is a one-woman hospital for the handful of students in the room.

She simultaneously provides voices for the patients, administers medicine and, when students call for her, becomes the ward's resident doctor, "Dr. B. Good."

She watched as a student failed to notice that the lab reports for Ima Wheezy, an 80-year-old with congestive heart failure, were mixed up with another patient's and erroneously treated her.