NEOMED Alumna and Local Reporter Team Up for Standardized Patient Exercise

Learning ways to interact compassionately and effectively with patients is a skill best practiced before leaving professional school. So, sessions at Northeast Ohio Medical University’s Wasson Center for Clinical Skills Training, Assessment, and Scholarship are a staple of medicine and pharmacy students’ curriculum — and also useful for health care professionals following graduation.

Reporter Betty Lin-Fisher of the Akron Beacon Journal was curious about what takes place in these training sessions, so she became a Standardized Patient for a day, completing a Wasson Center exercise with Alyssa Carvalho, M.D. (’19), a first-year internal medicine resident at Cleveland Clinic Akron General Hospital.

Lin-Fisher played the role of a 50-something woman who showed symptoms of chemical dependency and substance abuse. To prepare for the exercise (as any other Standardized Patient would) she studied pages of details and back story about the patient she would play.

In the article Lin-Fisher wrote for the Akron Beacon Journal, Dr. Carvalho said, “Sometimes talking to patients can be nerve-wracking. [This] helps in learning how to interact with patients and think like a physician.”

Read “Portrayal of patient helps train physicians.”