APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS:

• CURRENT PENN STATE EMPLOYEE (faculty, staff, technical service, or student), please login to Workday to complete the internal application process. Please do not apply here, apply internally through Workday.

• CURRENT PENN STATE STUDENT (not employed previously at the university) and seeking employment with Penn State, please login to Workday to complete the student application process. Please do not apply here, apply internally through Workday.

• If you are NOT a current employee or student, please click “Apply” and complete the application process for external applicants.

Approval of remote and hybrid work is not guaranteed regardless of work location. For additional information on remote work at Penn State, see Notice to Out of State Applicants.

JOB DESCRIPTION AND POSITION REQUIREMENTS:

The Penn State College of Medicine - University Park location is recruiting for Standardized Patients to work with medical students in the Student Learning Center located in State College, PA. This position will require on-site presence.

What is a Standardized Patient?

An SP is a healthy individual from the community who has been trained to portray, in a consistently reproducible manner, a patient/person in a medical and/or communication based situation. SPs receive extensive training regarding clinical communication skills, educational expectations, and components of helpful verbal feedback and other logistics of the environment. They study materials about the objectives and goals of the program in addition to a detailed story or "case" to portray, that is reflective of a real patient history or situation. SPs engage with learners in carefully designed "role play" events as though they were a person seeking care in some way.

Because SPs are involved in both teaching and testing of a variety of professional learners, training allows SPs to approach the work organically and adjust in order to meet the goals of different tasks.

Standardization is most relevant to formal testing of learners and refers to the management process of SP training, event design, and materials development. We train SPs to display an appropriate range of behaviors and use of personal judgement in order to ensure genuine and unique response to individual student skills.

SPs are able to:

• Provide individualized feedback – a proxy for patient’s perspective
• Provide continuity, reproducibility, and realism
• Respond to learner skill – reinforcing human connection
• Evaluate skills by checklist completion
• Provide objectivity and diversity

Working as a Standardized/Simulated Patient (SP) provides a unique opportunity to be involved in shaping the education of tomorrow’s physicians, health and other profes