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Unannounced Standardized Patients

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Objective Structured Clinical Examinations

Abstract

Although the use of standardized patients (SPs) is widely used in assessment, the vast majority of SP exercises/exams involve announced encounters in which the learners know that they are interacting with a simulated patient. Objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) are considered a gold standard for assessing clinical skills, but their overtly contrived nature may limit their ability to capture the true behavior of medical professionals (Ozuah and Reznik 2007). The use of unannounced standardized patients (USPs) is a relatively new but increasingly used method for evaluating the competence of medical professionals (Glassman et al. 2000; Rethans et al. 2007). USP encounters do not have the artificial time constraints of OSCEs, and USPs can evaluate subjects in a real clinic setting.

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Correspondence to Sondra Zabar M.D. .

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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Zabar, S., Burgess, A., Hanley, K., Kachur, E.K. (2012). Unannounced Standardized Patients. In: Zabar, S., Kachur, E., Kalet, A., Hanley, K. (eds) Objective Structured Clinical Examinations. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3749-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3749-9_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-3748-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-3749-9

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