Behind the Curtain: The Unique Role of Standardized Patients in Medical Education with Katie Culligan

Do you want to peek behind the curtain of the medical world? You're in the right place. We've got a special treat for you today in the form of our guest, Katie Culligan, a professional actor turned standardized patient. Katie brings to light how she and her colleagues play a crucial role in shaping medical practitioners' skills through simulating various medical conditions and cases. She shares her unique journey and the impact she's made in the medical education sphere.

Katie isn't just an actor; she's an educator and innovator. She's breaking ground and challenging norms playing different genders and ages in medical simulations. Katie explains how she convincingly depicts medical symptoms she doesn't have through various tools and techniques. From using props to mimicking complex medical procedures - she's done it all. Katie's wealth of experience provides an illuminating perspective on the complexities and nuances of medical simulation training, particularly for women.

But that's not all. Katie's role extends beyond mere acting; she is also instrumental in providing feedback that shapes the future caregivers. She unpacks how she leverages her experiences to offer valuable feedback to medical students, contributing to their growth in this demanding field. This episode is a goldmine of insights for anyone curious about the intersections between medicine and performance art, and the transformative learning experience standardized patients offer to future doctors. Join us for this fascinating conversation with Katie Culligan and discover how she's making an impact in the world of medical education. Tune in now!

Here are the links for my Katie and Standardized Patients podcasts and content :

• Show website: https://www.standardizedpatientspodcast.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/standardizedpatientspodcast/
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@standardizedpatientspod
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/thestandardize1?s=11 (we don't use this this actively these days, but if people like twitter, they can find us there too)
• Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend/Fan Episode "The Professional Patient": https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conan-obrien-needs-a-friend/id1438054347?i=1000544389665

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Hello and welcome to the Wellness Musketeers podcast, where we discuss and inform on matters relating to health, wellness, fitness topics and even some current events as well. I'm your host, aussie Mike James, a freelance writer and speaker with over 30 years of international experience managing leading corporate fitness centers in Australia and in Washington DC with the World Bank Group. Joining me today is my fellow Musketeer, dr Richard Kennedy. Welcome, richard. Thank you, michael. Dr Kennedy is an internist who has over 36 years of clinical experience, including the World Bank clinical services and private practice. Now, a very special guest today is professional actor and standardized patient, Katie Culligan.

Speaker 1: 0:59

Since 2008, katie has simulated hundreds of medical conditions and cases to help medical students learn how to diagnose and communicate effectively with patients Think about the importance of bedside manner by your doctor. Katie and her colleagues help doctors learn how to be better doctors. So today we're going to dive into the who, what, where and why of this quirky industry that not many people have heard of standardized patients. In fact, my only real recollection, if I can call it that, was a fine-filed episode called the Burning, and I'm sure Katie's been reminded of this over the years, and in this episode, cramer and his friend Mickey Abbott get an acting gig playing sick patients for medical students and they're assigned a gonorrhea and bacterial metatitis respectively only on SineCop. So again, I'm pretty sure Katie's been reminded of that episode over the years. Now Katie's on the staff at Jordan Medical School and has worked at seven different medical schools and several other simulation programs. She's a James Madison University alumni, stage and film actor, certified fitness trainer, hip exercise instructor, wife and, most importantly, mother to a toddler. Welcome, katie.

Speaker 2: 2:19

Thank you so much for having me Hi.

Speaker 3: 2:23

Okay, katie, we're going to start, and first question I'd like to ask you is can you explain to our audience what exactly it means to be a standardized patient and how you came to be a standardized patient practitioner.

Speaker 2: 2:38

Sure, yeah, what it means to be a standardized patient is basically med schools hire actors, or some semblance of actors often, who are paid, typically, sometimes volunteer to be portraying patients with certain ailments. So it could be anything from ow my stomach hurts to I'm getting some bad news and I oh my goodness, you're telling me I have cancer, so anything that runs the gamut of that to med students all over the country, depending on the simulation program, and we, as standardized patients, basically evaluate those med students and give them feedback, sometimes verbal feedback, sometimes written feedback. But we are here to help them understand how it feels what they did in their encounter with us, how it feels to be in our shoes as their patient. That's great.

Speaker 3: 3:36

That's great that is a great answer and a little side note to this I went to medical school in Pittsburgh and one of the interesting things was initially they had us while we were learning to interview patients and things like that, they did have I called the models and then portray a patient at a particular condition and we were all evaluated based on that. So this actually is refreshing to see that the one is still doing it. Yeah, that's awesome. And also, for the same, the main reason and we'll probably talk about it a little bit later is that bedside manner is critical.

Speaker 2: 4:23

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 4:25

It's critical. But, moving on, how many different types of cases or encounters have you been involved with and what is the range of the medical conditions that a practice of standardized patients includes? And what does a typical encounter consist of?

Speaker 2: 4:43

So that I could. Just the question is like, how many different types of cases have I been involved with? So many? I don't think I could actually quantify that because I've just, over the years, done so many. Some it feels like a million times. Some I've only done once. But, like I had mentioned earlier, it runs the gamut. I've played patients who have it's more about what's going on in their head how are they interacting with the world around them the med student or the doctor versus patients that are literally just I'm in pain, please help me, like I'm coming in because I have this pain and it's all about the physical ailment. I want you to treat me well, but also please help me because I'm in acute pain, so that I've just done so many and the range truly is, if you can think of it, I'm. There's a chance.

Speaker 2: 5:40

I portrayed something in the realm of that and I realized I didn't answer your question earlier how I got into it. So just a backtrack. I was in a show with a wonderful actor and she said I hope to never have a day job again, meaning like a non acting job, and I said how do you do that? And she was just out of college and she was like I do these role playing things and some of them are a lot of them are standardized patient work, and so she and another castmate sent me some resources and said these are the ones I work with.

Speaker 2: 6:16

Remember, if you go and audition or reach out to them, remember I'm reflected in this too. So please be professional, please show up, do that, of course, and ever since then I've never looked back at such a cool industry that, like in their right, it doesn't feel like a day job, because you're, you do get paid to act and you also get to learn a lot about med school and I know so much more from doing it. So, anyway, just wanted to touch base on that. Yeah, it sounds like an exciting endeavor.

Speaker 3: 6:47

If I was younger, I'd consider doing it myself. Hey, you could do it now.

Speaker 2: 6:55

That's the best part is, if you wanted to, you would bring a lot to the table. You don't have to be a young. It's not a young person's game. They need people from all walks of life. A person who's not a young person Walks of life ages everything. Yeah, yeah, though I know you're a doctor, so you're probably busy.

Speaker 3: 7:10

Well, we'll have to talk about that. But how do you prepare for a typical encounter? What kind of information and detail are you given and what kind of feedback do you give physicians, medical students, afterwards?

Speaker 2: 7:30

Yes. So preparation for this encounter or any encounter, it can be very different depending on the encounter or the school or who you're portraying. Sometimes it is literally I get a paragraph this is like the most like hands off. It'll be like you are this name, this age, you're upset because you're having this pain or the shortness of breath and something in that nature, where it's very much like we have to improv a lot of it.

Speaker 2: 7:59

But some, and I would say a lot of encounters that I've done are very highly trained and detail oriented. It might be a packet of like 20 pages of information that we. It can be overwhelming. But then not only do we have to read it ahead of time, and sometimes we get paid to read it at home and prepare for it, if we're lucky but then we go into a training that can be hours long, with a group of standardized patients, sometimes online, a lot of times in person, and we ask questions and we go through it. And then we even do a mock encounter like just a little bit so people can put it on the feed, ask questions, and then we go into the encounter and we do it a bunch of times, maybe on a different day or different week. So it really depends on a lot of factors of how much work we put into it, which can be. It can be awesome and it can be challenging, depending on your personality and skill set of how they're different.

Speaker 3: 9:04

Yeah, it sounds. It actually sounds like a lot.

Speaker 2: 9:08

Yeah, it is. It is a lot, a lot. And you asked also about what kind of information and detail are you given and what kind of feedback do you give to physicians, med students afterwards? This is our favorite part typically about standardized patient work is being able to give feedback to people who are ideally open to hearing it, and so we often, very often, we have the ability and opportunity to give feedback in some way. So whether it's written, as I mentioned earlier, like online, they get to read it later or, my favorite is verbal, where the encounter ends, the patient sorry, the med student leaves the room and then they come back and I say hey, so my name is actually Katie and would you be open to hearing some feedback from my perspective as your patient, and that way we get to really have a nice rapport.

Speaker 2: 10:04

So when you said this thing, it made me feel a little unsure of where the encounter was going. Perhaps if you had done this thing, I might have felt a little bit more reassured, and oftentimes we often sandwiched that with positive feedback. When you shook my hand, when you walked into the room and gave me strong eye contact, I felt confident. So we try to make sure that our feedback is specific and measurable, so meaning that, rather than just being like that was great, you did great, it was cool. But how can we tell them? Like when you did the specific behavior, it made me feel generally good in some way, shape or form, or generally bad, and here's how it made me feel bad, and here's how what might have made me feel better, or just I don't even know the answer to what might have made it better, but I do know that this is how it affected me. So that's the cool thing about feedback that we get to be specific and we are often asked to give them feedback.

Speaker 3: 11:09

Oh great, that's actually really good. And that leads to this next question, which is to me interesting Do you play patients of all ages and had simultaneously? Because you're a woman, do they also ask you to play the role of an older man, maybe, or a younger man in a particular condition? And if so, well, if the answer is yes, what does that do to the encounter?

Speaker 2: 11:41

Yeah, that's a great question. So, yes, the answer to that is I've played all different types of ages and a few different types of genders. Honestly, like very rare that I'm asked to play a man. But for some types, for formative meaning, like learning opportunities, not a, not an examination Typically I wouldn't be playing someone that's so out of my, my role, but for something that's you're helping teach these students.

Speaker 2: 12:09

So right now we're going to do this example case and you're going to be playing this 58 year old man who's coming in with chest pain because he just ate five guys burgers. But it might be something different. So then the students have to differentiate. Is okay, is it Harper, or is he actually have? He has some, has medical history of like heart issues. Should we take it seriously and is he having a heart attack? So that type of thing can be just more used as a tool rather than we don't believe you that this woman is playing the 58 year old man, like they just have to get over it.

Speaker 2: 12:42

And that's often the case with all the things. It's like we we can only do and look like what we look like. Sometimes we put on certain word robes that make us lean into a certain thing. But I have played a lot of female characters, for sure, and but I've played different age ranges. I once played like a 86 year old who and again this was a formative event where they're learning and the students walk out of the room and when they come back into the room, like they typically know me as Katie, and all of a sudden I'm like this woman who can barely function, like they have to move my body to get because she's all out of it, and so those can be fun because it throws the students for a loop. However, I will say that just regarding type, if I am being asked to do an examination, I am often asked to do something close to my type.

Speaker 2: 13:37

It may not, I might. I might be like, ok, you're 50 years old, ok, I am not 50 years old, but I'm, if I could enough portray a 50 year old woman, or like you're 20 years old, I'm not 20 years old, wish I was, but I could still somewhat believably be that, whereas, like when I've been asked to play a 14 year old girl, that's a little bit, I've done it. Or a three year old done it. That's a huge stretch, but they just have to understand that we're not here for the believability, because you're not going to get the same type of education.

Speaker 2: 14:11

If you actually had a three year old, or real three year old, they wouldn't be able to communicate Feedback. You can understand the process of what we're doing. So the last thing to your question, though, is specific symptoms, visible conditions that I don't have. This is a huge, great question, because if there are fluid in the lungs, let's say and of course I would be very lucky to say I wouldn't have fluid in my lungs typically- but, I portray a case that day that, let's say, my character has fluid in her lungs.

Speaker 2: 14:41

What would happen is if they say, okay, I'm going to listen to your lungs now and they do it. And then, after they've done it, I will give them a card that says fluid and right lung on back or whatever.

Speaker 2: 14:53

Or we've even had the opportunity sometimes to use a thing called ventrilo-scope Sorry, ventrilo-scope, yeah, yeah, they can like and we would say this is what you would hear when you do that. Or even without the card or the ventrilo-scope, it would say I would just say and you would hear there's fluid in my left lower base of the lung, something like that. That's the least common one that we have to verbalize it, but that can be on the table. So basically we have to set aside, like just it's almost a little time out without totally breaking character, and we say and this is what you would hear. And then we go back in the character oh yeah, yeah, I know Wild, right.

Speaker 3: 15:38

Oh, good, that's it. Yeah, yeah, when you think it, and it makes you think of, because you could pretty much pick any health condition, be it mental or physical, and I suspect you can make it very basic or it could be relatively complex. And I had asked what was, in your experience, what has been the most complex patient experience you've had to portray?

Speaker 2: 16:06

Oh my goodness, that's a really good and challenging question because it depends on what type of complexity. I've done a case that was very much like I was barely acting in it, like it was all about. The students had to come in and they had to use a bunch of tools and there was a fake arm sitting in the room. We're sitting there, but we have a checklist and they have to learn how to Drill an IV or something into the arm.

Speaker 2: 16:38

Yeah, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Of course we're not using our real arm because, ouch.

Speaker 3: 16:44

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:46

But that is a very complex thing that we had to learn and be, but at the same time we're sitting there being like I'm crashing, go and do they do the thing. Okay, they brought the thing over, they did it. Yeah, we did the blood spurt out, Okay. So we're checking the boxes of that. So that's complex in one way. But there's also been complex, more character based cases, and some of them the complexity is I think I mentioned earlier the some of the cases are like 20 pages long and they have such a really detailed excuse me, detailed backstory and we have a lot of lines that we have to say verbatim, word for word, so it'll be like a paragraph, and then, if they ask this question, I have to say this line, and so that can be complex and just as an actor or person memorizing and making sure that I say it. So it's standardized.

Speaker 3: 17:40

Okay.

Speaker 2: 17:40

And we can give our own flavor to how we say those things. But the more we are expected to say specific things in a case like if it's a quantity, that's just that can be really complex, and sometimes it's. I, my hobby is to read to read Agatha Christie novels or something like that, and it's. Do we need to know this information, like when we're trying to learn everything else? In this case, do we really need to know that is the type of novel that we're reading, when most likely is not going to come up.

Speaker 2: 18:15

Yeah, yeah, it's just funny, but yeah it's. And once again, some people are going to like those complex cases more. Some like it where we don't have to memorize as much. But that means you got to use a lot more improv skills of bringing your whatever to the table and having that, being neutral when you need to, but then also being just off the cuff, really there and present in the moment so you don't Go the wrong route or send them the wrong route.

Speaker 3: 18:47

Yeah, yeah, I know that's a long answer to your question, but yeah, but it sounds like what it needs to be, because it medicine is challenging it. You have to be able to think, and you have to be able to think on your feet. Yeah, and you cannot. I Learned very early in my career the best doctors are the ones who, by the time you have finished your interview with the patient before you've put your hands on them, 95% of the time you should have a pretty good idea what's going on. If you haven't, you didn't listen, ah, which means in didn't ask the right questions based on what they were telling you.

Speaker 2: 19:38

That makes complete sense, and I love hearing that from a doctor's perspective. So that's really wonderful. Did you ever work with standardized patients?

Speaker 3: 19:47

Oh, yeah, mm-hmm. When I was in in Pittsburgh and then when I was in New York at Columbia, yeah, and you, what you found was that some people are very believable of the roles they were playing yeah that you will, I remember, distinctly remember this.

Speaker 3: 20:11

She was actually 67 in real life and she was playing someone who was 25 who ended up having a shoot of appendicitis, and we were the questions she was. She then the emergency room and she's trying to describe her pain, which, of course, at that time was very atypical. It wasn't a classic pain. It wasn't in the right place of the abdomen that you typically expect to see it, mm-hmm and but she kept giving clues to the students and it was fascinating to see only One of the three picked up on it.

Speaker 3: 20:54

Oh yeah question, which meant that person was listening and it had a lot to do with it, so she was very believable, because a lot of people you get people get confused when they see, physically, a person who looks one way right but we're training something else. It's hard for them to the disconnect that what's in front of them and Put in place what they would expect to see if it was a person who really presented that way.

Speaker 2: 21:25

Yeah, absolutely. I believe that a huge thing and helps teach students first of all that to get a poker face and to come across as non-judgmental. But also, I imagine out in the real world that you may not see that exactly, but you might still expect to see one thing, and then you're encountering something else in the room and it's probably really important to Keep a neutral face right to not let that throw you. So then they don't say hey.

Speaker 2: 21:53

I Felt judged by this doctor. I'm not going back to this doctor. I don't trust them now, oh yeah.

Speaker 3: 22:01

And you said something very early on. But when you just said, when you mentioned walking in the room and shaking the hand of the person who's gonna be provided here to you, if that person was shaking your hand and looking down at the floor or looking over to the right or the left Gives a totally different impression to the patient. Yeah, I mean for something. Yeah, whatever it is, they're coming for something. And if you're not there, I always say this is something I learned from my mom. She used to say when you're in the room with people, be present.

Speaker 2: 22:41

So true, so true.

Speaker 3: 22:44

And that's true in real life, but even more so in medicine.

Speaker 2: 22:50

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love hearing that. Thank you for sharing and I'm curious. So because you work with standardized patients I have. Has that helped you, like as a doctor? Was that something that brought anything to your skills? I?

Speaker 3: 23:07

Think it has more because you, as you observe and watch, you learn to look back on your own experiences, because medicine is pretty basic the same diseases that existed 2,000 years ago or the same ones today. The only difference is we have more tools to get access to the answers.

Speaker 2: 23:36

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 23:38

But the history and the physical are still the most important and it gets reinforced with that Standardized patient has been. Now you need people who are, have a willingness and, just like in every other discipline in life, you have some people who are all into what they're doing and there are people who, basically, are talented enough, smart enough, gifted enough that they can skate the surface and it works until you get that. And I always say Other dilemma is it works until you get that one patient who really needs you to be present and you something, and it has dire consequences for that individual. Yeah, you know, the one thing is it's one thing to To miss to miss a pitch in the baseball game and and it's another thing to miss an important point that leads to someone's demise that could have been a.

Speaker 2: 24:46

Yeah, life or death.

Speaker 3: 24:47

Yeah much.

Speaker 2: 24:48

Yeah, big deal. Yeah, that's, so true, hmm.

Speaker 3: 24:52

Yeah, so that do. And when you're giving the feedback to them, do you Do you give them critiques on the best way to go forward? In other words, you can give positive criticism, but it should always be a learning experience, something because technically, none of us ever does it perfect. Sure, no matter what people say, we never really do it perfectly. What role does this standardized patient play in helping them?

Speaker 2: 25:35

Yeah, I think it's so cool that we do play a huge role because even standardized patients of course we can be standardized in how we're taught and we portray the case but as humans and when we're giving feedback, we're saying me as this patient, monica, I felt, katie felt, and my experience might be very different than, let's say, if you were portraying that same case, that you might have preferences or things that you don't like that happen.

Speaker 2: 26:10

That I was like actually that was perfectly fine, it didn't bother me one way or the other. What's really cool is we get to give not only general feedback of when you ask this open-ended question it allowed me to give you an open-ended, a lot of information. That's more kind of like checklist, but communication style feedback. But then to be like when you said this one thing, I felt XYZ, and that again that's from my experience as Katie, as the patient, rather than Dr Kennedy's experience as the patient. You might have been like no, I actually felt it didn't make me feel one way or the other or vice versa. So I think that's what's so cool is that we get to bring a human, subjective perspective of how it went in that moment, because the same student, med student could do the same exact case to another person and maybe because they were able to learn from me or take something away, now they can do it a little bit better or a little bit stronger.

Speaker 2: 27:18

Maybe better is not the right word, but for the next patient and be more present might be one of it, because that certainly is feedback we give, but we also do try to give, as I mentioned before, specific feedback. So it's very much like one of my favorite things to ask my students after feedback session in verbally is, I'll say, the things that I felt were good or specifically, and then something that they could work on, sometimes a few things that they could work on. I try to be tactful. I do try to be tactful and professional about it.

Speaker 2: 27:50

But I often say okay, so before you leave, after you have any questions about it, anything else and then I'll say what's something that you learned from our feedback session today that you would like to put into your next encounter. And it helps them say this specific thing I would like or plan on trying for the next one, and that's really cool because you can see them put it together and you hope that they use it and who knows if they do have the next encounter. But it's that, yeah, yeah. So that's one of my favorite parts about it.

Speaker 3: 28:22

Oh, that's good. Do they, do you videotape? Are you videotaped? And then do they have access to the videotapes going forward?

Speaker 2: 28:33

Yeah, so we are often videotaped in the encounter rooms, off not all the time, but in the encounter rooms there are several cameras all around, there are microphones, not like in our faces, but they pick up and oftentimes we are recorded.

Speaker 2: 28:53

Therefore, people such as the students or preceptors, doctors, mentors, professors, can watch it either in real time from an observation room or after the fact, so they can then see their work there. Okay, so see, when you did this one thing, that's why they you missed asking this question, but that's why they, when they feel about this evaluation you were, you didn't get credit, that it can be that type of a thing to a backup to be like, because again, we a standardized patient or simulated patients we are not perfect either, of course like we can work really hard to be present and remember everything, but in an examination scenario, which is where this comes into play, there are times where we did. They ask if I have a family history of heart disease. Oh my gosh, this is my sixth encounter today. And did they ask it? Or did the last person ask it?

Speaker 2: 29:42

So, those were the times when it's really beneficial to we can go back and rewatch the recording after the fact and have that backup. But a lot of times it's really just for that. It's not. They don't show it to the world. It's not public or it's very private, secure, but it is often recorded, yeah.

Speaker 3: 30:04

Yeah, it should be a learning experience on both ends actually.

Speaker 2: 30:08

Absolutely.

Speaker 3: 30:10

It's, and part of it is, I think, for a lot of, particularly those going into medicine who've never really had any experience as a patient themselves and really have not. They're now all of a sudden. You go from being a student to where someone, one day after you graduated, on July one, basically someone's going to call you Dr, so and you're the, you walk in the room and the person in front of you expects you to be that doctor, and so it can be somewhat nerve wracking if you're not prepared. That's why, as they like it, almost everything else, practice does make us better Me, not make us perfect, because there's nobody on the planet that way, but we should be able to close.

Speaker 2: 31:02

As they always say, practice makes progress right.

Speaker 3: 31:04

There, you go.

Speaker 2: 31:06

I love that thing.

Speaker 1: 31:06

It's so true.

Speaker 3: 31:07

It's so true that is how has your experience as a standard. That patient helped you to be a better actor 100%. Yeah, and and what would you say? That these encounters are basically a form of work. Is it an improvisation exercise? Is it? It's real world, in the sense that you can make the actual conditions that people might have and so therefore be a learned experience. So when that medical student, soon to be doctor, actually is on the other side, where it really counts, it will make a difference.

Speaker 2: 31:48

Yeah, it's definitely made me a better actor, because you're it's almost like film acting a little bit, because it's a little more nuanced. You're not making this sweet thing, but it's not huge, it's all very intimate one one. Sometimes a couple of different doctors are in there, a couple of different patients, but it's very specific and nuanced and we have to be realistic. That's the goal we, even if we're not playing someone who we are exactly like, we still want to be as realistic as possible so they can then treat us realistically too.

Speaker 2: 32:19

So, it's helped me definitely with my improv skills, but also, just, yeah, as an actor. It's definitely helped me tie into my emotions, like of when we do challenging cases where we have to get upset or cry, we're getting bad news To go with what we're feeling. Rather than pushing tears or pushing we have to figure out, oh, the doctor or the way that the med student is talking to me is making it's making me feel so supported and heard that actually I'm getting more upset in a good way, like it's helping me release, rather than, oh, they're very detached and cold and how they're delivering this news, I'm just going to shut down and I'm going to be angry. So, like it and you feel it, and so that has been a huge emotional exercise when I've done those cases and also sometimes just learning how to be neutral and do no harm.

Speaker 2: 33:07

Don't as I mentioned earlier, don't send them down a detour where they're going to spend the next 20 minutes asking about your drinking, when it's no, this person doesn't have a drinking problem, like if they came in because they have stomach pain, whereas a standardized patient they were just improving and said, yeah, I drink five drinks every single night, I'll liquor. Obviously the doctor's going to be like okay, why don't we talk about that when it's that's not important to that? Like like, why did you that's yeah. So I hope that answers the question.

Speaker 3: 33:38

Oh, yeah, yeah. So, katie, you've created a podcast series called the standardized patients podcast. I understand that, as a guest, you have been featured on Conan O'Brien's podcast. What made you decide to start this podcast, and what topics do you cover?

Speaker 2: 33:55

So we my podcast partner, catherine Bublack and I decided to start this podcast, called the standardized patients podcast, before I was featured on Conan O'Brien's podcast. Believe it or not, that was just a happy, wonderful surprise, but we started the podcast I think we recorded almost all of our season one in late summer fall of 2021. And the reason that we decided to do it is because I had this big experience being a standardized patient and we realized that there were no other podcasts about standardized patient work. There were a couple episodes of podcasts here and there that focused on some standardized patient work, but in a very oversaturated market as podcasts are these days, it was really refreshing to realize wait, there is not a podcast that is just about standardized patients. That is currently happening, and I have a lot of experience as a standardized patient. I have a large network of standardized patients and etc. That I have not only worked with a lot but also are friends with, and so we reached out to different people and garnered interest in seeing if they'd be willing to come on our podcast and, if so, what would they be willing to talk about? And we had so many subjects that we wanted to cover that we realized we needed a season two. So we're doing season two right now and who knows if there'll be a season three, but there really is so much to talk about that we haven't even covered yet.

Speaker 2: 35:36

That's where we decided it was worth making a podcast. So we knew it would be a niche audience. But we figured between other standardized patients, people that want to get into the work, people that want to learn about standardized patient work, people that are curious about odd jobs, day jobs as an actor or med students, doctors, etc. People in the health, medical field. I thought it would be a really good hub for people to come learn about this line of work because it is fascinating, and I think it's fascinating and which is a good thing, considering I'm the host of it.

Speaker 2: 36:12

But to just touch on the Conan O'Brien podcast, I had reached out to them because they were open to hearing from fans and I told them a little bit about myself and I put in that I was a standardized patient and I thought that might be a cool thing if they were interested.

Speaker 2: 36:32

And they were interested and so I was really excited to get an email from Team Coco to ask what I'd be interested for a pre-interview and then got me on for an actual interview and it was just wild and exciting that that brought standardized patient work to a whole nother platform, because his audience is huge and people that don't even care about what we do, they still will listen to that podcast because he's funny and they like what he brings to the table. So it was a really cool opportunity and I'm still pinching myself that it happened. But it's just funny that after that, the following March was when we released our podcast and it had nothing to do with that podcast that I was on. It just happened to be a really cool coincidence. So long-winded answer, but that is the answer to those questions.

Speaker 1: 37:24

Thank you, katie and Dr Kennedy, for such a very informative discussion on standardized patients, and hopefully we now all have much more information on the area of standardized patients than an old Seinfeld episode. And thank you for joining us at Wellness Musketeers. Tune in for upcoming episodes to gain the tools to improve your health, work performance and live with a greater understanding of the world we experience together. Please subscribe, give us a five-star review and share this recording with your family, friends and colleagues. You can make a contribution through a link provided in our program Nats, to allow this podcast to grow. Let us know what you need to learn to help you live your best life. Send your questions and ideas for future episodes to davilis at davidmless at gmailcom.