Association of Standardized Patient Educators (ASPE)
The Association of Standardized Patient Educators is the international membership organization for educators who work with standardized patients and other human role players in health professions education. ASPE describes itself as dedicated to human simulation, and it publishes the Standards of Best Practice (SOBP) that programs use to guide SP safety, case development, training, program management, and professional development. The SOBP were published in Advances in Simulation and are maintained as a living document.
Source: Association of Standardized Patient Educators, Standards of Best Practice
ASPE holds the same position for SP methodology that SSH holds for simulation more broadly, and its five SOBP domains are the practical reference an SP program gets measured against: safe work environment, case development, SP training for role portrayal, feedback, and completion of assessment instruments, program management, and professional development. ASPE states that the standards were written to protect the growth, integrity, and safe application of SP-based education practices.
The safe work environment domain is the one that surprises people new to SP work, because it treats the SP as a worker with real exposure rather than as a prop. Portraying a suicidal patient or a grieving parent repeatedly across a day of OSCE stations carries a cost, so a program that wants to keep its most experienced SPs has to plan for confidentiality, for recovery after emotionally heavy portrayals, and for the conditions under which an SP can stop.
The training domain is where ASPE's influence on assessment shows up, since it covers not only how an SP learns a role but how the SP gives feedback from the patient's perspective and completes assessment instruments consistently. That combination of portrayal, feedback, and scoring is what makes an SP encounter usable for grading rather than only for practice. ASPE also runs an annual conference and member professional development, which is where much of the field's shared vocabulary gets settled.
What this looks like in a program
- An SP program that maps its written procedures to the five SOBP domains has a ready answer when an accreditor or a dean asks how portrayals are kept safe and consistent.
- The SOBP are explicitly a living document, so a program that adopted them years ago should check current practice against the current version rather than against an old printout.
Related terms
Last updated August 2026