Why Partner with the UPSOM SP Program?
The Standardized/Simulated Patient/Person (SP) Program was founded to serve the medical school at Pitt. Since our inception, we have grown to serve the Pitt Schools of the Health Sciences, the Law and Education School. We also work with partners throughout the city and region to support the growth of learners through role play education. (Please note we use the word learners, rather than students, because many of the people we work with are already professionals in their fields).
SPs are a vital component of role-play experiential education, which can benefit any organization that seeks to strengthen its learners’ communication, empathy, and interpersonal skills. In medical and health science settings, SPs also train and assess other clinical skills, such as physical examination skills. SPs offer the learner the opportunity to learn through self-assessment, practice, and observation. In brief, if your learners need to interact with people, SPs can help.
SPs are educators, who are trained extensively to portray complex individuals (sometimes in challenging situations) within given parameters while calibrating their portrayal to recognize and reward learner skill. Beyond providing real-time feedback of in-the-moment reactions to the learners during the conversation, SPs are also trained to provide post-encounter:
verbal feedback on the learner's observable behaviors, and the impact they had on the patient. In most events, SPs do not coach or advise – they reflect what happened and how it impacted them as a human being. Feedback in this format allows the learner to self-reflect and choose what to change and what to keep in their approach to communication.
written competency assessments of learners, once trained on identified checklists or rubrics.
What does Partnership Look Like?
We work with you to craft an event (any series of encounters between an SP and a learner) that fits your learning objectives and assessment needs, and then train our SPs to support it. Our partnership includes:
Crystallizing learning objectives to clarify learners' goals and how SPs can best support them.
Consulting on event design and logistics (how many SPs do you need, how many rooms to run, what timing would be optimal, etc.) to best support the learner skills you are training/assessing.
Material review (cases/scenarios, assessment tools, all SP-facing materials).
Piloting new events before you run them to be sure event days go smoothly.
The benefit of working with professional SPs who are trained extensively in portrayal, aligning that portrayal with the needs of the learners, and providing safe and portable feedback to each learner.
Support from a program with decades of experience in meeting the needs of learners, SPs, and faculty following national and internationally accepted Association of SP Educators Standards of Best Practice.