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[Narrator] A Standardized Patient takes on the characteristics, history and symptoms of a real patient and interacts with our students as if they were in a real life setting, such as a hospital room or in the emergency department.
[Angie Phillips, Prelicensure Program Director, School of Nursing] When we have an opportunity to bring in a standardized patient. it sometimes is the very first time a student actually can lay hands on a real person.
[Dane Larson, Nursing Student] It just feels like you’re actually having a real patient interaction with someone, and I think that that has significantly added to my ability to learn and process the information as it comes through.
[Marla Craft, Adjunct Faculty, School of Nursing] They have a lot more realistic picture when they work with a Standardized Patient.
They get more nervous, but it also builds their confidence for when they have to go into the hospital situation and be exposed to real people who can be unpredictable.
[Kelley Connor, Director of Simulation Based Education and Research] Actually, let’s just start over, shall we?
My name is Kelley Connor. I’m the Director of Simulation based Education and Research at Boise State University.
I started in 2006, and when I started, the school had just gotten a grant from the Idaho Workforce Development to purchase simulation mannequins. It didn’t take us long to realize that the mannequins couldn’t do everything that we wanted them to do. So we wanted to start bringing in Standardized Patients.
[Becky Bunderson, Former Simulation Director, School of Nursing] We offered an internship credit to Theater majors that would be Standardized Patients.
And so I think those were our very first Standardized Patients.
[Kelley Connor] So it didn’t really always work out with timing. We had issues with our Standardized Patients coming to our simulations.
Usually what would happen in those early days is I would have to run around the Nursing Department to find out
who was available at their desk, and I could just put a patient gown on them and tell them to say a few things and be my patient.
[Becky Bunderson] We really didn’t want the faculty to be the Standardized Patients because that puts the students in a very uncomfortable position.
We needed a larger demographic of Standardized Patients: older, younger, male, female, more life experience that they could bring to the table.
[Kelley Connor] So what grew with our Standardized Patient Program is we realized that we needed to have adequate training for Standardized Patients and we needed to hire people who were a little bit more able to improv with our students.
[Jennifer Potcher, Standardized Patient] I’m an actress and I was looking for more acting work, and I thought it would be a great way to use my skills, but also do something that makes a difference.
[William Parker, Standardized Patient] I can’t do what nurses do, and I’m not a teacher myself, so I really like supporting the people that really put themselves on the line.
[Berta Tavlin, Former Standardized Patient] It seemed like the students really thank me so many times for making the effort or being a Standardized Patient, so they got the real feel of what it would be.
[Bren Porter, Nursing Student] They do have the opportunity to kind of let us know what their perspective was during the simulation.
[Margaret Quatraro, Nursing Student] It’s just like this real time, very pliable, applicable feedback to what am I learning and what could I do better and what am I already really doing well.
[Bren Porter] A lot of the times in hospital, we don’t get to hear that kind of feedback from patients.
[Angie Phillips] So if you think of Standardized Patient as a science and an art, it’s the science of understanding medically what’s happening to the patient, but they have to be comfortable with the art of acting and pretending.
[Kelley Connor] and we’ve grown a lot. So I think the vision for the future of our program will be maybe that we could be a hub for the valley where we’re really training the Standardized Patients and then helping facilitate so they can go out and work for different entities in the community.
[Narrator] Standardized Patients are co-creators of an imaginary world where everything needs to feel, look and sound as if it were the world of an actual patient.
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