The Use of Standardized Patients in the Training and Evaluation of Physician Assistant Students

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The education of health care professionals poses unique challenges in teaching and student evaluation. Didactic sessions can convey disease presentations, complications, diagnostic approaches, and treatments, as well as present detailed mechanics of medical procedures. Such sessions, however, may not transmit the practical ability to apply this knowledge in patient encounters. Furthermore, traditional testing may fail to identify students who are struggling to apply didactic knowledge to clinical settings. Unfortunately, deficits in clinical decision making and/or procedural skills may not be identified until after students have left clinical training. Thus, there may be few opportunities for additional instruction or other remediation. One approach to address these issues in health care professional education has been to incorporate standardized or simulated patients into training. Standardized patients (SPs) have a variety of backgrounds. Some are professional actors; others are paid participants who receive little or no training. Still others are volunteers who are asked to provide their own medical history for student practice. SPs have been used extensively in physician and nursing education, where they have proven to be valuable educational tools.1-4 SPs can provide specific advantages, including the portrayal of a standardized case, thus controlling for variability in comorbid medical conditions and nonmedical aspects of patient encounters. Practice with SPs may provide durable improvement in students’ communication skills. In a study of performance in family medicine and internal medicine residents, Yudkowsky and colleagues reported Bridget Calhoun, MPH, PA-C, is assistant professor and chair of the Department of Physician Assistant, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Colleen Vrbin, BS, is a health care data analyst at the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dana Grzybicki, MD, PhD, is a pathologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Department of Pathology, Denver, Colorado.