The University of Prince Edward Island is looking for “patients” for its new medical school, but not necessarily actual sick people.
The UPEI faculty of medicine, which plans to welcome its first students in the fall of 2025, is seeking what it calls “standardized patients” to help students learn how to take medical histories and do physical examinations, as well as develop their communication skills.
“They don’t have to have any particular skill set,” Tammie Muise, director of the school’s clinical learning and simulation centre, said of the new hires.
The job isn’t necessarily for someone with acting experience; you just have to be good at improvising as well as paying attention to detail.
‘People can bring their authentic self to the encounter, because they don’t have to pretend to be someone else,’ says Tammie Muise, the director of the UPEI medical school’s clinical learning and simulation centre. (Rob Leclair/CBC)
The school is holding information sessions this fall so that Islanders can learn what a standardized patient is and does.
After that, there will be an application process with interviews and lots of paid training for those who are accepted for the casual positions. They can then choose to participate in a certain simulation if it interests them and they’re available, Muise said.
She said the school doesn’t have a specific number of positions in mind, but will need a “robust database” of employees to draw from.
Wages up to $25 an hour
The job will pay up to $25 an hour, a rate that Muise said is competitive with what’s offered at Memorial University in St. John’s. The new UPEI school will be a regional campus of Memorial, and students based in Charlottetown will be taking some classes remotely until the faculty is up and running.
Training the standardized patients will be a job in itself, Muise said. The school will hire a group of educators to do that.
The simulated medical appointments will take place in 16 examining rooms at the new $91 million med school building on the UPEI campus, which is still under construction.
The school is also planning to create a mobile simulator, which would send the actors out into health-care facilities across the province to help train new staff and upgrade the skills of existing employees. That mobile unit could start in early 2025, Muise said.
‘You need to have trust’
Dr. Preston Smith, the medical school’s dean, says using real people rather than mannequins will help prospective doctors develop their bedside manner, including how to establish rapport with a patient.
Dr. Preston Smith is the first dean of the new medical school at the University of Prince Edward Island. (Rob Leclair/CBC)
“You need to do that before you can ask them details about their life,” he said.
Med school students will begin by learning basic communication skills. By their second year, they will be learning how to do things like a detailed neurological exam.
“You need to have positive rapport, you need to have trust — that’s part of healing,” Smith said. “We need to make sure that we train them that way.”
The simulation will involve a faculty member, students and a standardized patient.
“The role is not to act like you are having chest pains,” Smith said. “The role is to act like you would responding to a doctor in an average checkup.”
Smith said in his past experience, the “patients” employed by medical schools enjoy the work and feel like they are making a contribution to health care.