So at SUNY Downstate, we have a course called Essentials of Clinical Medicine (ECM) that basically focuses on the social aspects of being a good physician. That includes developing good communication and the ability to respond correctly to a patient's culture, values, race, ethnicity, and anything else that makes the patient unique. It's also the course that teaches us how to take a patient's social history: age, where they live, career, financial status, insurance status, relationships, religion, diet, etc. Over the past weeks, we've had small group discussions in which we discussed our own experiences with our doctors and what we liked and didn't like. We also discussed different ethically challenging scenarios.
Recently, we've gotten into doing standardized patient (SP) interviews. For those unfamiliar with SPs, they are actors who are specially trained in acting as patients, sometimes as a patient with nothing out of the ordinary, but also sometimes as patients with a deep and complicated story and personality. For our ECM small groups, each of us have taken turns being the medical student interviewing and SP to acquire a brief patient social profile. One student sits in a chair facing the SP sitting across from him while the rest of the small group sits at a distance to observe. This setup is definitely very artificial, but it is a safe place to at least go through once the motions of talking to a patient and getting peer feedback!
