What role do Standardized Patients play in medical education?

Are you planning to build a career as a doctor? If yes, then you should get real with your expectations while at the medical school. It is good to be well-informed about the training or course before diving into it.

The word “doctor” might seem fancy to you, but it’s not that easy to become one. As a medical student, you may find yourself in the medical school for at least eight years. During this period, you will learn about various things including pathology, anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry. And you may need to spend countless hours with your textbooks learning important terminology and ethical practices. During your medical education program, you may not get enough chances to experience real-life interaction with patients. This is why you have to complete a standardized patients training program.

Now you must be wondering - what are Standardized patients? 

They are people trained to portray a patient with a medical condition in a standardized manner, giving the opportunity for students to learn skills in a simulated clinical environment.     

Importance of Standardized patients in medical education 

Standardized patients program has been included in medical education since the 1960s. It was introduced as a method to evaluate medical students with an objective clinical measure. However, it took a long time for this program to be established as one of the major parts of medical education throughout the United States. 

The basic purpose of a Standardized Patient is not to portray a certain illness or disease accurately, but rather to convey students about the illness in a consistent and standardized way. Any great actor will work well as Standardized Patients, but an excellent SP needs not to be an amazing actor. This means anyone become an SP with proper training and skills doesn’t matter whether they are a good actor or not. 

Depending on your medical school, the standardized patient programs may vary from simple counseling sessions to proper physical examinations. These programs will help you develop great communication skills with patients, clinical skills, interpretation skills, and testing examination skills. 

In simple words, standardized patients help medical students to learn crucial skills in a consistent and measurable way. After the performance from the SP, you may have positive changes in your thinking and actions. This allows you to prevent yourself from misdiagnosing or prescribe wrong medication to an SP without any side effects. Since it is a risk-free environment, if you do any mistakes like misdiagnosing and wrong prescriptions, it can be corrected before you work with real-life patients. Also, it is important for a standardized patient to be flexible, which means they should be able to adapt to any type of scenario and trainee. 

To conclude 

Standardized Patients play a crucial role in the medical education process and every aspiring doctor needs to undergo a standardized patients training program. Hopefully, by reading this post you’re clear with the benefits of having SPs in medical education. 

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