Talking Shop
Standardized patient program teaches important communication skills to medical students
How does a physician learn to talk to patients? By starting very early in medical school with standardized patient instructors.
Standardized patient instructors are people who have been trained to portray a specific patient role, assess students’ clinical skills and provide constructive verbal feedback on a student’s performance. Topics include medical history taking, tobacco cessation counseling and giving bad news. SPI exercises begin as early as two weeks into a medical student’s first year. U-M med students will have 15 of these “patient” encounters by the time they graduate. Students are videotaped during the experience so they can see their strengths and weaknesses firsthand.
Diane Rosinski of Ann Arbor has been an SPI for the past seven years. Her daughter, Amy, then a medical student and later a House Officer V in Psychiatry and Psychometric Medicine, convinced her to try the program. Mrs. Rosinski, formerly a high school teacher, says, “It’s making a difference. The students are evaluated from the minute they open the door to the patient. The students I talk with say that the standardized patient portion of the United States Medical Licensing Examination is actually easier than what they do here. They’re amazed at how well prepared they are.” Students must pass the USMLE in order to practice medicine.
Daughter Amy Rosinski, M.D., agrees. She recently joined the U-M Department of Psychiatry as a consultation-liaison fellow and says, “The Standardized Patient Program was invaluable in giving me practice and feedback in interviewing medically ill patients, and I now feel very confident in my abilities.”
In 1989, U-M was one of the first medical schools in the United States to implement a formal standardized patient instructor program for students. And Michigan is one of a few schools in the nation that uses standardized patients so early, so often and so rigorously.
U-M’s SPIs come from all walks of life and range from 14 to 80 years of age.
“Standardized patients are a great way for a medical student to learn how to talk to and examine a patient without risk,” says Casey B. White, Ph.D., assistant dean for medical education. “They also give faculty a reliable measurement of a student’s clinical skills level and serve as a tool for educational and assessment purposes. They are a great way to address education gaps in an extremely consistent manner.”
|
