Why can't we all just get along?

Last week I had to interview a "standardised patient", or SP. The SP is an actor whose role is to play a patient that we interview or examine for the purposes of assessment. It's a good system because the SP is given a brief of what things he should say under what circumstances, and he can improvise the rest.

Early on in the course (as I am), it seems that the primary thing they want us to develop is some kind of skill at showing empathy. Or faking it convincingly, either will do. To that end, after we interview the SP to take a medical history from them, they give us a score for our empathy skills. I think it would be better to get qualitative feedback rather than quantitative. But then, I got an okay score since I am [irony] Empathy King [/irony] and maybe they're happy as long as we aren't pathologically hopeless, and those who are get extensive qualitative feedback on their many flaws. Which must be a barrel of laughs.

My interview got off to a strange start because I was in the room waiting for the SP to turn up, having a bit of a chin wag with my Illustrious Tutor. I was pretty nervous since although it's a straightforward task, if you get nervous you tend to forget things, so I got nervous about getting nervous. All of a sudden the SP comes in, fresh from having seen the previous student in another room.

SP
Wow, that was terrible. I forgot my lines in that one. Just made up something, I think it was okay.

Illustrious Tutor
Ha ha. Well, it doesn't matter much.

SP
No, it wasn't going very well anyway. Ha ha.

Me
[Starting to feel like a third wheel]
Hello.

SP
Hello. Well, I'd better get into character. Pffft! Pffft!
[Blows air out of puffed up cheeks, flaps arms like a Chicken Tonight ad.]
Okay, let's go.

It was all very strange and surreal. In a way it helped though, because it emphasized to me that this guy was just pretending to be sick, so my natural response was that I would pretend to be a doctor. This was a big improvement over talking to Real Live Sick People (tm) because then I find myself painfully aware that they have real problems and I am not helping them out one little bit with all my clumsy questioning, so I try to rush and it all goes pear-shaped. With this guy, I was able to take my time and make doctor-like noises like this: "mmmMMMmmm". It was a lot of fun. I think next time I'll try to rustle up a clipboard and maybe one of those reflect-y head-lamp things. Or is that dentists? Just the clipboard then.

Med school - teaching students to pretend to be doctors.