STANDARDIZED-PATIENT USE OUTSIDE OF ACADEMIC MEDICINE - OPPORTUNITIESFOR COLLABORATION BETWEEN MEDICINE AND PHARMACY

Background: Utilization of standardized patients (SPs) in academic med icine is well known, bur little has been done with SPs in pharmaceutic al education. We present a new application for SPs in pharmacy educati on, and discuss how resources, costs, and expertise may be shared betw een the two academic disciplines to maximize SP use. Description: We d eveloped a ''pharmacy Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) '' used to evaluate clinical skills associated with pharmacy education and practice. The SPs in pharmacy were more standardized participants , because they could portray a physician, nurse, or patient. Program d evelopment evaluation, and implementation was accomplished in conjunct ion with the college of medicine's SP program. Evaluation: Comparable to academic medicine's OSCE experience, interrater reliability data sh owed good to excellent agreement between raters and Cronbach's coeffic ient alpha ranged between 0.54 and 0.79. Conclusions: This program rep resents another use of medical SPs that can benefit both academic disc iplines.