Denise/Dennis Jones the Standardized Patient with a Mood Disorder

Abstract

Abstract Encounters with simulated patients, followed by feedback, are an important tool to transfer communication skills from classroom to clinical environment. A standardized patient (SP) intervention in the psychiatry clerkship can be beneficial in enriching medical students' history-taking and suicide risk-assessment skills and can raise trainees' confidence in screening and assessment of patients with suicidal thoughts beyond the level achieved with classroom-type teaching. In addition, senior medical students believe that suicide risk assessment is one of the most important skills to acquire in medical school and particularly in the psychiatry clerkship. We developed the SP Denise/Dennis Jones to address these concerns. The SP case was written by one of the authors, a psychiatrist with extensive experience in treating people with bipolar disorder and a peer-support specialist who introduced elements of her own experience in the scenario. This SP interaction occurred during the second-year central nervous system integrated module, which included lectures and team-based learning activities on topics of psychopathology, taught along with neurology, pharmacology, and pathology. Lectures about mood disorders and suicide were included in the module. Prior to the SP interaction, students were exposed to either a virtual patient or a video intervention designed to teach basic suicide risk assessment. Then, after reading the information provided in the door note, students were instructed to interview the SP for no more than 15 minutes. A 5-minute warning was given to students before the interaction ended. In our study, students were not asked to write up the encounter, but the SPs completed a yes/no 25-item checklist. The assessment was not graded because only students who volunteered to participate in the study interacted with the SP. Sixty-seven second-year medical students agreed to participate in the study. The results from their experiences were overall positive.

Keywords

• Depression
• Standardized Patient
• Suicide
• Bipolar Disorder