Standardized Patient

Today I interviewed my first standardized patient! Truthfully, I think it was more intimidating to talk to the patient because I had a roomful of my classmates observing and not because I was actually nervous about talking to a patient.

Just so everyone is clear, standardized patients are local people who are trained by UNMC to adopt personas that allow students to practice patient interview techniques in a safe environment. We actually don't even meet with these patients in an exam room setting (except for test days), we meet with them in small classrooms. These patients are trained to critique students on specific interview skills that we're supposed to be practicing. We have the ability to "time-out" at any point during our interview to ask for guidance from our classmates or our preceptors (my group has a general practitioner and a microbiologist leading us) or to simply just to reorganize our thoughts. It's really helpful, although seriously intimidating, to have 10 other students surrounding you and supporting you while you're talking with a patient. Because we haven't had much practice, if any, with these skills we often are unorganized in our interviewing and we can also tend to forget important questions to ask, so our colleagues (holy goodness...not only are these people my classmates, they're actually my colleagues! That's pretty cool!) can redirect us or make helpful suggestions about good questions to ask.

One set of skills that we were supposed to be working on can be summarized with the acronym "PEARLS." Basically, the purpose of PEARLS is to validate the concerns of and empathize with the patient ("Yes, I can see why that would worrisome to you..."). The letter 'R' in PEARLS stands for 'respect'. One of my classmates asked "How do we do respect?" today and I replied, "Ask Aretha Franklin." Only one of my classmates chuckled--I'm assuming it was because she's the only one that heard me and not that people didn't get the joke and/or I'm not actually funny. But anyway, enjoy a little Respect from Aretha!

Friday is our video-taped interview with a standardized patient. I'm sure glad that I got my first small-group standardized patient interview under my belt before then!