Clinical Skills Lab
 
 

The Clinical Skills Laboratory is designed for teaching and assessing learners at all levels, from first-year medical and nursing students to senior residents, physicians, and staff utilizing standardized patients. The lab provides learners with 16 furnished exam rooms, creating an ideal setting to practice history taking, physical examination, patient communication, documentation, presentation, and clinical reasoning skills. Establishing a safe environment for practice and for feedback, the lab develops simulated patient encounters which are vital to the successful transition of students from the classroom to providing care with real patient contact.

 

Encounters with specially trained individuals, known as standardized patients (SP’s), simulate specific challenges in outpatient, inpatient and critical care settings. From infants to professional actors, retired teachers to laypersons, close to 75 participants make up the pool of SP’s. Clinical cases are created through research and extensive training of the patients portraying these roles. The simulation can also include makeup or “moulage” to simulate an illness or injury. Even a patient’s real-life medical condition can be used to enhance the educational experience. Standardized patients also play roles in events taking place in the Surgical and the Virtual Medical Environments Lab as family members, medical personnel, or additional injured patients during combat and disaster simulations.

 

First year medical and graduate nursing students learn how to take medical histories from SP’s and perform physical examinations.  Second year medical students add clinical reasoning to their patient encounters. Third year medical students use SP’s to test their specialty skills on different clinical scenarios in Pediatrics, OB-GYN, Family Medicine, Psychiatry, and Surgery. Each exam room is equipped with three video cameras and microphones to record the encounter. An observation area at the center of the lab allows faculty and students to observe the encounters live or view digital recordings for subsequent analysis. When a clinical examination is completed both student and patient complete an assessment of the event.