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. 2021 May 20;58(9):881–887. doi: 10.1007/s13312-021-2312-5

Simulated Patients for Competency-Based Undergraduate Medical Education Post COVID-19: A New Normal in India

Anil Kapoor 1,4,✉, Anju Kapoor 2, Dinesh K Badyal 3
PMCID: PMC8464191  PMID: 34016804

Abstract

The conventional medical curriculum in India needed more focus on explicit teaching and assessment of interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism, team-work and reflection for prevention and better management of increasing incidences of violence against doctors by building good doctor-patient relationships. Increasing number of seats in Indian medical colleges, decreasing hospital stay of patients, and decrease in faculty requirements will hamper adequate supervised authentic clinical experiences of undergraduates for developing clinical skills. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant decrease in student-patient encounters. Simulated patients are being used in many countries to address many of these issues. To make the Indian medical graduates competent to function as primary physician of first contact, competency-based medical education along with guidelines for use of skill-lab and simulation has been introduced from 2019. The current review is focused on the need and use of simulated patients; their advantages, limitations and role in students’ teaching and assessment. It also gives a brief outline of their training process. Simulated patients should be used to supplement day-to-day learning, help in transition to attending real patients and also save enormous faculty time in the post-COVID-19 new normal. However, simulated patients are unlikely to completely replace real patients’ experiences.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at 10.1007/s13312-021-2312-5.

Keywords: Clinical skill assessment, Competency-based assessment, Medical education, Simulation, Standardized patient

Electronic Supplementary Material

Appendix (144.2KB, pdf)

Footnotes

Note

Additional material related to this study is available with the online version at www.indianpediatrics.net

Contributors

Anil K: conceptualized the draft, drafted the initial manuscript, did literature search, revised the manuscript and approved the final manuscript before submission and act as guarantor of the paper; Anju K: literature search, initial drafting of manuscript, reviewed the manuscript and approved the final manuscript before submission DKB: reviewed the manuscript, provided critical comments, and approved the final manuscript before submission.

Funding

None

Competing interests

None stated.

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Supplementary Materials

Appendix (144.2KB, pdf)

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