Bigger and more realistic. That’s how Stephanie Murray, M.D., describes the Standardized Patient Center that will be part of the new Wichita Biomedical Campus.

“It’s going to dramatically increase the number of students we can teach in the space,” said Murray, who is medical director of the Standardized Patient Center at KU School of Medicine-Wichita.

Located on the new building’s sixth floor, the Standardized Patient Center will be used by KU for clinical skills training for medical and pharmacy students. It will feature:

• 24 individual exam rooms (the school’s current center has 12) plus an adjacent 20-person pre- and post-event area
• Two 40-person classrooms for larger groups
• Two rooms designed for Point of Care Ultrasound training, where multiple learners can work together using technical equipment for hands-on learning
• Also on the sixth floor, a model pharmacy and clinical skills lab will be located where pharmacy students develop preparation techniques and practice patient-care skills

The school’s Standardized Patient Center helps prepare medical student and residents using standardized patients, who’ve been trained to simulate actual patients. For students, encountering standardized patients helps them learn to examine, diagnose and communicate with patients, including those who may be upset or otherwise challenging. The encounters are monitored by faculty and SP staff, who give students feedback on how to improve. Students can also watch video recordings of the SP sessions.

“Standardized patient encounters are safe places for students to learn how to be a doctor,” Murray said. “How to approach different situations, how to take a history, how to do an exam. So, they can have that confidence when they go into a clinic or hospital.”

The center also administers a required clinical skills assessment of students at the end of their third year.

While most center users are students in their first three years, it’s also used by residents for training, simulated experiences and assessment of skills in their specialties.

Murray said the new Standardized Patient Center will have one design feature that represents a significant improvement over the current one: separate entrances into the exam rooms for students and standardized patients.

“That’s going to help us with some creativity and integrity for the cases,” Murray said. “The fidelity of the experience for the student is so much greater because you’re not passing your patient in the hallway during a lunch break or something like that.”

Murray and the center’s staff work with faculty to create case scenarios for students. Having twice as many exam rooms will allow the center to offer more than one of those scenarios to students at a time, which will be helpful as the school’s first- and second-year cohorts each grow from 28 to 70 students.

“In fact, it’s necessary,” Murray said of the larger space. “We can’t increase our class size complement without this upgraded building.”

The center will use the classrooms for instruction and workshops in skills such as note writing and sensitive exams.

Unlike the fifth floor, where anatomy labs will be shared by students from KU Wichita, Wichita State University and WSU Tech, the sixth floor will be used exclusively by the medical and pharmacy schools — at least for now.

“This is a KU floor,” Murray said. “That said, the likelihood that down the line there could be collaboration, I wouldn’t shut the door on that.”

Learn more

Go to the Wichita Biomedical Campus page to learn more about the new home for health sciences taking shape in downtown Wichita.