ETSU’s hospital partnership saving lives

Students in East Tennessee State University’s Digital Media Department, known region-wide for investing in area communities, have partnered with East Tennessee Children’s Hospital. Over the last few months, more than 100 ETSU students have helped craft training for nurses centered on improving fast responses when crash carts are used.  

A crash cart, often equipped with emergency medical essentials that can be deployed quickly, is a vital resource in hospitals.  

“This is a real project with real clients, and there’s only one grade that’s acceptable: right and done,” said Dr. Tod Emma, department chair.  

The hands-on learning these students are receiving is having an immediate real-world impact – a partnership that’s at the heart of ETSU’s approach to education. The clear goal is helping students move from enrolled to employed. 

Video Transcript

Levi Walker: 

So I work as a producer alongside my co-producer, Samuel Pennix together.We started about a year ago kind of forming the pre-production, kind of the skeletons of what you see here today.

It started off with some concept work. We had to work with the hospital directly to get some storyboarding and some script writing out.

Once you get those bare bones, you can kind of start moving along with some asset creations and different pipelines start coming in.

Dr. Tod Emma:

It's an amazing experience for us.

It got started when one of our past grads roommates got a job at East Tennessee Children's Hospital, and we built that one person relationship up to this community building experience where we put probably 100 undergraduate students through it on the four different collaborations we've had.

The hospital saw room for improvement in the way that they were training their staff for these kind of opportunities.We were able to fulfill that, and when the staff got donetraining on this virtual training method that we created for them, they were able to score better on tests and felt more comfortable on it.

And some of the staff said they felt like the training we were doing was helping them to save lives. It is something that you just wouldn't get outside of a production experience and being able to give our kids this hands-on experience where they're getting to meet the medical professionals at the East Tennessee Children's Hospital, worked one on one, go through the revisions and finally get to see the efforts of their labor is just incredible.

Samuel Pinnex:

So a year ago I was a 3D modeler and made some of the environment pieces for one of the older projects and specifically for this project, me and my co-producer, Levi, we've worked together to really put together a workspace for everyone on the team.

We've had to recruit everyone that you see in this room today, and we've had to meet with the hospital with things like concept art and storyboarding for the project that you've you've seen today throughout this whole entire semester, just kind of working with our team and observing and working with them to get this project to where it needs to be for the production timeline with the hospital.

Jacy Richardson:

You know, I give them art direction, but as far as what the project is, it's you know, it's for the nurses. And so we're actually making something that will be used by the nurses.

It's not, you know, just something for the students to make.

It's actually going to be used and implemented.

Kinslee Hammonds: 

Honestly, if we didn't have that industry experience, we would go into the industry very, like, ignorant to a lot of things, such as, you know, in our software engineering class we have somebody who's been in industry for 10 to 15 years and he actually can give us that.

Like this is Scrum, this is Agile and this is how we use it in the industry.

Dr. Tod Emma: 

This is a real project with real clients and there's only one grade that's acceptable: Right and done.

So when they go into it with that mentality, it changes their personal expectations, raises up their quality of work, higher than they were aware that they could even do.

And these kind of opportunities are so rare. 

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East Tennessee State University was founded in 1911 with a singular mission: to improve the quality of life for people in the region and beyond. Through its world-class health sciences programs and interprofessional approach to health care education, ETSU is a highly respected leader in rural health research and practices. The university also boasts nationally ranked programs in the arts, technology, computing, and media studies. ETSU serves approximately 14,000 students each year and is ranked among the top 10 percent of colleges in the nation for students graduating with the least amount of debt.