UTILIZATION OF SIMULATED PATIENTS FOR CLINICAL SKILLS TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT

Abstract

The utilization of normal people portraying patients for clinical skills teaching and assessment has growing worldwide for the last decades, due to its capability to overcome the inconveniences associated to the use of real patients. As far as teaching is concerned, interaction with simulated patients may precede work with real patients, thus allowing that clinical skills learning may occur in a safer and less uncomfortable environment for both students and patients.The utilization of simulated patients also favors active learning and uniformity of opportunities between learners, allow tasks to be repeated several times, with prompt correction of distortions. The utilization of simulated, standardized patients in examinations allows the inclusion of the relevant clinical problems and situations, at the appropriate complexity level, while permitting the assessment of large numbers of examinees in the same conditions, which favor the fulfillment of both validity and reliability criteria. This paper presents a brief discussion of the educational concepts underlying clinical skills teaching and assessment and the utilization of simulated patients. Comparisons of the main advantages and disadvantages of using real or simulated patients are presented. Practical aspects and hints on recruiting, selecting, training and using simulated, standardized patients for clinical skills learning and assessment are presented, based on the small scale, albeit persistent, experience gathered at Ribeirão Preto Faculty of Medicine, University of São Paulo, Brazil, in the last decade.