Standardized Patient (SP)

The word doing the work in the term is standardized. An actor can play a convincing patient, but an SP is trained so that the portrayal varies only with what the learner does, and that property is what lets two learners be compared. Howard Barrows, who pioneered the method, described the aim as a person coached to simulate an actual patient so accurately that a skilled clinician cannot detect the simulation, which covers body language and affect and not only the history.

In practice an SP does three jobs at once, and a program that plans only for the first gets less out of the encounter than it paid for. The SP portrays the case, completes a checklist or rating scale on what the learner did, and gives feedback from the patient's point of view, which is the one perspective a faculty observer cannot supply. The ASPE Standards of Best Practice treat all three as trainable, along with the safety of the person doing the portraying.

SP encounters are costly in a specific way that shapes how programs use them. The cost is not only the SP's time but the room, the scheduling, the faculty observation, and the case writing behind it, so SP contact tends to be rationed to the moments that matter most, such as an OSCE station or a graded assessment. That rationing, rather than any doubt about the method, is why programs keep looking for other ways to give learners the repetitions that should come before the graded encounter.