Quality assurance processes for standardized patient programs.

Area of Science:

• Health Professions Education
• Communication Skills Training

Background:

• The pharmacy profession is expanding to include non-dispensing services and collaborative care.
• Effective communication skills are increasingly vital, with standardized patient (SP) programs playing a key role in their development.
• Best practices for ensuring the quality of SP programs are not clearly defined.

Purpose of the Study:

• To summarize quality assurance processes for standardized patient programs.
• To identify best practices from health professions education literature.

Main Methods:

• A literature search was conducted in PubMed and Scopus from 2011 to 2016.
• Twenty-two articles relevant to quality assurance were selected for thematic analysis.

Main Results:

• Four key themes emerged: enhanced SP training, structured student feedback, statistical inter-rater reliability measures, and SP performance observation/evaluation.
• Specific quality assurance methods identified include training content and feedback techniques.

Conclusions:

• Common strategies exist for evaluating SP performance consistency, feedback effectiveness, and grading reliability.
• Further research is needed to establish standardized quality benchmarks for SP programs across healthcare disciplines.