Using Standardized Patients in Advanced Practice Nursing Education: What is Best Practice?

Clinical experiences are essential for advanced practice nursing education.  Standardized patients, people who train to enact a simulated clinical problem, are widely used in medical education.  Increasingly, it becomes a useful learning activity in advanced practice nursing education.  This learning activity has been used in many ways, from simple skill practice such as pelvic exam to more complex clinical encounter.  Faculty in collaborated with standardized patient coordinator, who trains standardized patient’s acting, formulates objectives and creates a teaching and learning plan several months prior to the actual presentation.  Students present with different clinical encounter such as back pain for an episodic visit.  Students take history and do physical exam and write up a SOAP note.  This simulated experience is used for formative and summative evaluation.  Students are evaluated by faculty, self, and standardized patients.  Feedback is given immediately by faculty and standardized patient right after the experience.  This is especially important for the times when clinical preceptors and patients refuse clinical faculty to observe students’ performance with a patient in clinical setting.  It gives the faculty an opportunity to observe a student’s performance.

Our Nursing Practitioner Program has used standardized patients for clinical education for several years.  Although it was successful, the lessons learned from this experience and evidence from literature reviews and implications for the future implementations will be discussed.