Rutgers nurses create gory 'Hospital of Horrors'

The Halloween event doubles as an educational exercise

Blood and guts -- part and parcel of working in medicine, right?

Yet at Rutgers School of Nursing's "Hospital of Horrors," students get a choreographed dose of gore -- and creepy music -- with their education.

The Halloween-season tradition, while not open to the public, has been embraced for five years by staff and students at the Newark school. 

Nurses position dummies in beds and apply makeup and other accessories to illustrate some kind of medical situation -- whether it be an accident victim with gaping wounds, a jaundiced baby or a child with chickenpox. Students must determine the protocol for each example, identifying where the hospital has made an error. 

Debora Tracey, assistant director at the school's Center for Clinical Learning, heard about other schools putting together similar Halloween events, but wanted hers to hold some educational value for students, says Linda Curley, instructor and clinical lab learning coordinator at the center. 

"We want them to have fun and we want to stimulate critical thinking," Curley says. Staff create fake blood, blood clots and guts from props and powders. It took instructors about a week to assemble the display in between classes. 

"They were really shocked by the guy that was all bloody, the trauma patient," Curley says. 

The chickenpox baby proved especially challenging, she says, because lower-level students -- many of them who haven't encountered the virus -- have to learn that chickenpox is airborne, not spread by contact, so they have to take precautions to isolate the patient as if it were a case of measles. 

The "Hospital of Horrors" comes to the school's New Brunswick location for the first time on Oct. 27.