The Sports Medicine program adds a three-day lab session featuring standardized patient training as part of a program redesign.
Brent Marshall, Ed.D., Sports Medicine program director, and Jesse Shaw, DO, professor of sports medicine, have rolled out their revised model for the Sports Medicine curriculum at University of Western States.
In this new model, lab content for several different classes was collapsed into one lab course that students take mid-program and complete on campus in a three-day intensive session. As part of this program, Dr. Shaw and Dr. Marshall also unveiled the inaugural use of the standardized patient program in which trained actors play the roles of typical patients whom a sports medicine professional will encounter in their work, such as an athlete, coach, or a non-athlete who is beginning an exercise regime.
Dr. Marshall has been at University of Western States since 2014 and has been the director of Sports Medicine for two years. Under his direction, faculty and students of the program recently completed the first year of their new curriculum, which is the culmination of the most comprehensive revision to the program since its inception 12 years ago. This ongoing redesign of the curriculum includes aligning course offerings to better prepare students to work in clinical environments. Dr. Marshall says, “Part of our redesign was to allow students who are already working out in the field as clinicians to come back and get their master’s in Sports Medicine.”
Until this year, students taking courses in the Sports Medicine program have been predominantly Doctor of Chiropractic candidates on campus. The university is taking advantage of online instruction to bring in students from across the country and from different disciplines such as physical therapists and physicians, including MDs and doctors of osteopathic medicine (DOs).
Standardized patients are trained actors who portray scenarios that sports medicine professionals may encounter, commonly an injury that happens during a game. The students take turns interacting with the standardized patient, trying to determine the nature and extent of the injury.
In some scenarios, students assume the role of a trainer on the sidelines of a playing field who must tell a coach their star player has been diagnosed with a concussion and is going to miss the rest of that game and likely additional games, depending on the severity of the injury. The student must relay the information to ensure the athlete is removed from play through the correct concussion protocols.
“Standardized patients have been a great new development for our students because they allow us to replicate real situations that are hard to simulate,” says Dr. Shaw, an associate professor in his second year in the program. “I think our first go-round with the standardized patients allowed us to see how our students can apply the knowledge we’ve taught them as well as to see how they internalize and conceptualize what that interaction will look like.”
Dr. Shaw explains it’s one thing to teach students how to test for a concussion and what the diagnosis of concussion means, but it’s another thing to have a standardized patient recreate what the students will experience dealing with a living, breathing person for whose health, safety, and wellness they’ll be responsible.
“We weren’t sure how this was going to go for our first round,” Dr. Marshall says, “but as we were watching the video and hearing the way that the standardized patients interacted with the students, I said something to Dr. Shaw like, ‘I’ve heard all this before.’ The ways the actors portrayed the situations they were tasked with were verbatim words I’ve heard from coaches and athletes.”
Dr. Marshall was able to say to the students, “This is very real. The SPs somehow reached into our heads and pulled out memories of dealing with coaches who have said, ‘What do you mean they’re concussed? What do you mean they can’t play?’”
Without a script or a checklist, the students had to interpret what their standardized patients were saying and to formulate the correct responses. Dr. Shaw says the standardized patients were convincing in their roles, and none of the students took the exercise lightly. Without knowing in advance exactly what to expect, each student had a different interaction with a standardized patient, so even when multiple students were given the same clinical scenario, they were able to learn from one another.
Dr. Shaw believes the updated Sports Medicine program ushers in exciting new opportunities for internal chiropractic students at University of Western States to get sideline experience in clinical practice. “The university is taking ownership and leadership in high-performance sports medicine,” he says.
According to Dr. Marshall, the standardized patient lab offers University of Western States students rare opportunities to reflect upon and internalize the kinds of difficult conversations they’ll have as sports medicine providers.
Says Dr. Shaw, “This continues to show University of Western States’ dedication to growing the sports medicine field. Our excitement and dedication to growing the program is reflected in the enjoyment that the students get and the experiences that the students get.”