The UT Tyler School of Medicine is looking for volunteers to serve as simulated patients for the first class of the new medical school. The goal of the paid, part-time positions is to help medical students get used to working with East Texans. The hope is that these future doctors will chose to complete their residency programs and ultimately practice medicine here in East Texas.
Mike Landess: For UT Tyler Radio, I’m Mike Landess. It may be one of the most unusual calls for a part-time job in East Texas. The UT Tyler School of Medicine is looking to hire community members to role play patients and help train medical students. It’s part of the UT Tyler School of Medicine’s Simulated Patient program, and its director Dr. Karen Lewis is our guest. Medical thespians?
Karen Lewis: Indeed.
Mike Landess: Explain.
Karen Lewis: It works somewhat like theater. We create a script for our simulated patients and train them how to role play it. Give them direction, and they practice till we get what we want. And then they engage with our learners. And so, we start with the very basics. How do you take a history from a patient? What questions do you ask? And so the simulated patients give our learners the opportunity to practice that before they go out into clinics and try to take a history from a real patient. They’ll be more confident; they’ll have better skills, and they’ll do a better job, and they’ll make the patient feel safer.
Mike Landess: Now you’re talking about learners, you’re talking about medical students? Our medical students?
Karen Lewis: Yeah, our our first class, which is coming up first class. Very, very exciting.
Mike Landess: Now, who would be a candidate for this part-time gig?
Karen Lewis: Pretty much anyone who likes to role play. We are looking for people throughout the community of all ages, 18 up all the way to as comfortable someone is to be. And they need to have flexibility during the daytime in order to portray the role. But other than that, theater background helps. Not needed, though. I’ve had a lot of successful simulated patients who’ve never done theater before. Teaching training backgrounds are useful. People who are used to being in the public and working with people who can engage with others well, those are all skills you can have.
Mike Landess: We said “part-time.” How much time are we talking about in a given week?
Karen Lewis: It’s gonna vary from week to week. The primary course we’ll start out supporting is the course that teaches the medical students how to talk and act like physicians, basically. And that’s gonna take place mostly on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the afternoon. Sometimes we’ll need them to role play. Sometimes we’re gonna need people to be available for our students to practice how to do a physical exam. They’re gonna start with learning how to take a blood pressure and how to listen to the heart, and they need people to practice on. And so that’s another part. If you don’t like to role play, but you’re willing to let students examine you, and you’ll learn a little medicine in the process. It’s also a nice way to make lunch.
Mike Landess: Wait a minute. Do you have to wear the gown with no back?
Karen Lewis: You do have to wear the gown.
Mike Landess: Oh, boy. Oh, that would be some big role play. What’s the reasoning behind asking everyday East Texans to be part of this training?
Karen Lewis: We want our students to be familiar with the people in their community that they’re gonna be treating. Ultimately our goal is to find students who we’re gonna train, who wanna do their residency here and stay here in East Texas. They’ll already know the community that they’re gonna be engaging with. So it’s really a helpful way for them to learn, and it makes them more confident, but it goes both ways too, though. The people that are being a part of this feel like they’re being a part of something bigger.
Most people will say it’s very rewarding to them. They have those moments when they have they can see the light bulb go off with the student and they’ve caught it. Aha. Those aha moments are really important and makes them feel like they’re really training. And they are. They’re basically serving as teachers for our students.
Mike Landess: Now in the wake of COVID, a lot of folks I talk to feel like they don’t have as much interaction with their doc. They see their PA’s a lot. Could this program change that for future generations of physicians?
Karen Lewis: It certainly could. It’s gonna make patients, real life patients more comfortable. And as a result of engaging, if they serve as simulated patients, it’s gonna make them feel more comfortable, more likely to trust their doctor, and vice versa. I think the students who become physicians will be more engaged with their community, and that’s part of what the School of Medicine is doing anyway, trying to find ways to really get the students out there and engaging with the community.
Mike Landess: Let’s talk about you a little bit. You’ve been involved in the field of simulated patient training for some time. We have evolved quite a bit from the CPR dummies that some of us have had contact with. Tell us about that.
Karen Lewis: It started basically when the National Board of Medical Examiners decided that students should be tested by using simulated patients. And there was a national exam. There were pockets of people doing simulated patients. It really started in the sixties. But once that exam grew and, and it was mandatory, then everybody started developing simulated patient programs in the medical schools. And so it’s grown. It’s nationwide. And their exam was recently put on the shelf. They decided not to do anymore after COVID. But the simulated patient programs are here to stay. And a lot of us have to find a way to actually test our students, because we have to replace that information that we lost from the exam. It was a national exam. So now we’re looking at establishing regional consortiums to fill that gap.
Mike Landess: I was talking about CPR dummies but you have worked with a number of very high tech creatures that help patients. Tell us about that.
Karen Lewis: Yeah. We have a whole wide range of those. Now you’re talking about the CPR dummies. We now have, I call them robots. Technically they’re mannequins, but they respond like a robot. We program them to have a particular ailment or a particular trauma. Now, these will be more advanced students who usually engage with them. But they can run a code with them, or really, it’s useful for teamwork as well. When you have a group of students around, learning who’s the lead and whose role is what, and did you successfully revive your patient or not? Because the robots, it’s like the Wizard of Oz, or someone behind literally the glass; it’s one- way glass operating the mannequin itself and responding to whatever the students do in the group.
Mike Landess: I heard a story about one of these mannequins being able to give birth. Tell me about that.
Karen Lewis: Yes. Yes, it’s exactly that. We can control the delivery, how long it takes. If it’s gonna be a shoulder dystocia birth, then that’s a lot more exciting for the students, and so we can control that too. So, how the baby comes out, the length of time it takes, there’s a baby that comes.
Mike Landess: A mannequin baby.
Karen Lewis: Mannequin baby.
Mike Landess: Yeah, I heard the term was guacamole baby. What does that mean?
Karen Lewis: Well, they can be a little slimy.
Mike Landess: The UT Tyler Medical School in East Texas, boy, that had to be a pretty good incentive for you to come home.
Karen Lewis: Yeah, it was. It was a long stretch, but again, I’m originally from Texas, and we were looking for opportunities to come back. And the, the fact that this was a brand new medical school that we could start from the ground up was very exciting to me. So it was a good fit.
Mike Landess: Any final thoughts before we wrap up?
Karen Lewis: I encourage people to apply. We’ll have recruitment days for those people who apply. They can come in and learn more about the program itself, make sure it’s a good fit for them. We’ll put them through a little role play so they get the feeling of what that’s like, and then they can make their decision from there. So we really encourage people to give it a shot. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, but come out and try it.
Mike Landess: Our guest has been Dr. Karen Lewis, director of the UT Tyler School of Medicine Simulated Patient Training Program and Clinical Skills. You can learn more about being part of that program by following a link on our website, KVUT. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.
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