Dumke College of Health Professions
AMANDA KING Class of 2012
Her dream: To study health professions in honor of a fallen friend
From West Point to Weber
Amanda King recalls smiling faces and helpful classmates during her first day at Weber State University — a stark contrast to the serious military discipline at the U.S. Military Academy, aka West Point.
However, King didn’t pick WSU for its friendly atmosphere.
King graduated from West Point in 2006 and served eight years in the Army. While on tour in Afghanistan, her friend and fellow soldier, Jennifer Moreno, an Army nurse, was killed during a rescue mission. “I wanted to follow in her steps with medicine since she was unfortunately not able to,” King says. WSU offered the quickest path for King to fulfill her dream.
Last spring, King graduated from WSU’s paramedic program. For now, she works for a private ambulance service but hopes to eventually get the training she needs to become a fire department paramedic. “Weber State was definitely what I needed to make my dreams come true,” she says.
Teaming Up for Health Care
When health care professionals work as a team, patients benefit. That’s why interprofessional education — teaching students from all health professions disciplines how to provide team-based, collaborative care — is the future. And the future will arrive at Weber State in the fall of 2018, when the Ezekiel R. & Katherine W. Dumke Center for Interprofessional Education in Health Care (IPE) is set to open.
The 10,000-square-foot facility will provide health professions students with a centralized location in which to collaborate and communicate with faculty, and learn how care is delivered in a true medical setting. The high-tech building will also be a place to conduct research and stage conferences, lectures and presentations.
Not Your Ordinary Lab
WSU’s Annie Taylor Dee Simulation Center looks and sounds like a hospital. And that's the whole idea.
Nursing students rush to care for newborn “twins.” Emergency care and rescue students report the “mother’s” vital signs. Ventilators whoosh, EKG machines beep, and respiratory therapy students take turns counting compressions on the infants — “one and two and three and ….”
While the “patients” aren’t real — they’re lifelike mannequins — the setting, according to respiratory therapy student Kamiah Lansing, “feels real.”
“It teaches us how to respond in an actual medical environment, without having to worry about making mistakes and harming actual patients,” she says.
While health professions students have had access to a simulation laboratory since 2007, an extensive renovation in 2016 gave them a suite that features more space and more innovative technology.
The renovations were made possible by the Lawrence T. and Janet T. Dee Foundation and WSU’s Office of the Provost. The center’s namesake, Annie Taylor Dee, helped establish Ogden’s Thomas D. Dee Memorial Hospital in the early 1900s. The hospital featured the Dee School of Nursing, which became affiliated with Weber College in 1932.
The number of technologically sophisticated mannequins in the Dee Simulation Center