Guiding students through a virtual clinical experience, VCE: Red Rock Canyon Medical Center is a teaching hospital that is modeled after a real medical-surgical floor. It contains five patient rooms, a nurses' station, a supervisor's office, two conference rooms, a nurses' lounge, and a waiting room with an elevator. The following patients are seeking treatment in Red Rock Canyon Medical Center: Carmen Gonzalez: This older Hispanic female presents with an infected leg that has become gangrenous. She has Type 2 diabetes mellitus, as well as complications of congestive heart failure and osteomyelitis David Ruskin: Following a car-bicycle accident, this young adult African-American male is admitted with a possible closed head injury and a badly fractured right humerus. He undergoes an open reduction and internal fixations of the right humerus. Sally Begay: This Native American woman enters the hospital and is initially suspected of having a Hanta virus infection. She has a confirmed diagnosis of bacterial lung infection. This client's complications include chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and inactive tuberculosis.

Ira Bradley: Ira is a caucasian adult male with late-stage HIV disease who is admitted for an opportunistic respiratory infection. He has complications of oral fungal infection, malnutrition, and wasting. Andrea Wang: This young Asian female entered the hospital after a diving accident in which T6 is crushed, with partial transection of the spinal cord. After a week in the ICU, she has been transferred to the medical-surgical unit, where she is being closely monitored. Includes a guided tutorial which shows students how to work with a patient in the virtual hospital · collect patient data from various sources (reports, charts, medication administration record, short video clips and audio clips of nurse-patient interactions) · record patient data · listen to a report and itemize a patient's problems and high-priority concerns · and sometimes administer medications. Requires students to use their critical thinking skills to set priorities for care, collect data, analyze and interpret data, and reach conclusions about complex problems within a health-illness transition. Encourages active learning and provides opportunities to identify information to collect and process data for evidence-based patient care; work with data entry and retrieval screens; optimize use of available information resources; understand hospital information systems; manage information for decision-making; and maintain and improve core computing skills. A series of groundbreaking, new workbooks and CD-ROMs, Virtual Clinical Excursions bring learning to life in two different "virtual" hospital settings! Each lesson in Virtual Clinical Excursions has a core textbook reading assignment with corresponding CD-ROM and workbook activities.

The exercises in the workbook complement the content in the the parent text and provide a perfect environment in which students may "practice" what they are learning in the text. The workbooks act as maps - guiding students through the CD-ROM as they care for patients in the virtual hospital. Virtual hospital visits on the CD-ROM allow students to access realistic information resources that are essential to patient care.