“ We’ re doing our part in that little 30-minute segment to create a sense of healing for someone else down the line, so we are paying it forward.”
ACT II: MEETING THE MEDICAL STUDENT In many ways, we medical students become actors in this environment, too.
We also have a script with bullet points we must hit but with enough room for improvisation to make the character our own. Assistant Dean of Medical Education and Director of the Clinical Curriculum Steven Rougas, MD, says that one purpose of coursework with the SPs is to help students develop their professional identities. Indeed, we begin to forge our own characters as doctors— decide who we want to become when we arrive on the wards, choose the words that work, and the ones that simply don’ t.
But the“ acting” in this case does not equate to being disingenuous or even unrealistic. The anxiety outside the clinical suite doors is as palpable as a pulse after students have spent the hours before their exams reviewing and rustling through notes, not to mention the camera that watches us from the corner like we are the ones under questioning. Yet, as soon as the door opens, we are calm, we are smiling, we are collected, professional, and welcoming.
Once I transitioned from these simulated spaces with their soundproof walls to hospital beds with pull-through curtains, embracing the role of this unfazed physician became all too relevant as I learned by observing my mentors. When seeing anxious, unsettled, even scared patients in the minutes past midnight, the doctors’ overflowing pager messages and the other difficult cases they’ re juggling— all of these are brushed off outside of the new patient’ s door. Two knocks, and then it’ s a friendly hello, a seat on a chair by the bedside, and an outstretched hand. This assumption of the brief role of the welcoming acquaintance who just happens to have read a lot of medical books, unperturbed, is, in a way, an act. But it’ s perhaps the most realistic portrayal of who we are outside the walls of a hospital and the demands of a call schedule.
There are no faces behind a camera here, but we are still being watched by the most important evaluator: the patient. They may not be able to judge how precisely we measured their vitals, but they remember quite well how we made them feel. Some will be brave enough to tell us; others may be dissuaded by the power dynamic or choose not to, especially when the feedback is not positive. But it is the SPs who help prepare us for this crucial, daily test of our abilities in patient care.
“ We help to teach and help to instill bedside manner,” Oakes says. While SPs have a concrete rubric with which to
“ We’ re doing our part in that little 30-minute segment to create a sense of healing for someone else down the line, so we are paying it forward.”
William Oakes, a local actor and a standardized patient at Brown since 2004.
evaluate students, their written comments address,“ Did I feel cared for? Did I feel encouraged? Did I feel comforted? … Was that advice given to me in a nonjudgmental, nonstigmatizing fashion?”
ACT III: STANDARDIZED PATIENTS AND MEDICAL STUDENTS AS PARTNERS Many aspects of medicine involve a dichotomy between the medically detached and the emotionally connected. I recall my days as a first-year medical student in anatomy, studying the structures of a donor body. I would find myself swinging from being engrossed in finely dissecting out every vessel in a body cavity to taking a step back and remembering that this all lay inside a person, like myself, who had lived a full life I would never fully know. Transitioning into a hospital setting, the moments of being enthralled by the steps of a surgery or questions in a medical interview to uncover the diagnosis have always been balanced by the reminder of the person at the heart
12 HEALTH DISCOVERIES @ BROWN l FALL 2026