The Standardized Patients Podcast

For our Season 2 finale we’re going a little musical - This week we’re joined by guest Emily Whitcomb who not only chats with us about being an SP but shares her other talents with us as a singer and songwriter - with the power of improv - to help us create the ultimate SP Anthem.

Emily Whitcomb has been an SP for nearly 10 years and has been a role player for even longer. She has worked with various public agencies and the U.S. Army and Air Force for a variety of mass casualty, crisis intervention and mental health training scenarios. As a songwriter, she has performed throughout the Midwest and her songs have been featured internationally in commercials, films, and theatre productions. She enjoys teaching individual music lessons and workshops and is a member of the Minnesota Association of Songwriters.

Instagram | @ExtraEmily
Facebook | EmilyWhitcombMusic
Website | emilywhitcombmusic.com

Find The Standardized Patients Podcast at:
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Kerry McGee and returning guest & Jenna Rossman our here this episode to take us through another Workshop episode featuring - * drumroll * SP Encounters! Through a roleplay SP Encounter, Katie guides us through a thorough breakdown of what an average* Student/SP Encounter looks like and discuss the importance of “neutralizing answers” and best practices to transition a case to an encounter that best enhances the learning experience.

*yes, there are no ‘average’ encounters ;)

Kerry McGee is the Artistic Director at We Happy Few (WHF), an ensemble-based classical theatre company in Washington DC, and the Creative Director of a brand new company: The Literary Adventure Society (LAS).  LAS creates immersive audio mysteries that consist of a fully produced audio play and physical clues mailed straight to your home. Kerry has adapted several Sherlock Holmes mysteries and has given Catherine Louisa Pirkis' forgotten female detective, Loveday Brooke, a new theatrical life with brand new adaptations for LAS. Kerry has directed numerous productions for WHF including Elizibeth Inchbald's neglected masterpiece Lovers' Vows and a rousing production of Treasure Island that performed across DC in backyards, bars, and art galleries. Kerry received her MFA in Theatre Pedagogy from VCU, and has put her pedagogy degree to good use as a Standardized Patient Trainer and Instructor, and Physical Examination Teaching Associate for both George Washington University and Georgetown University. Her work with the medical students includes teaching specialized interview and general physical exam skills.

Jenna Rossman (she/her) is so excited to be back on the podcast! Jenna is an actor currently based in Washington, DC. Most recently, she was on set filming an indie drama, Small Animals, written and directed by Gary Parker and recently starred in an MFA student short film, Betty’s Bubbles. In addition to her on-camera work, Jenna has worked at a variety of theatres including The Kennedy Center, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Baltimore Center Stage, Rep Stage and Rorschach Theatre. Jenna still can’t believe she found her dream day job working as a Standardized Patient and Physical Exam Teaching Associate at multiple medical schools throughout the DMV. A big thanks to Katie and Catherine for creating an incredible podcast that uplifts this important work! Upcoming: “The Boundary: A Life and Death Experience” – an immersive production with Submersive Productions (Fall 2023).

Check out and support We Happy Few’s Kickstarter for Literary Adventure Society: Immersive Audio Experiences project - a classic mystery audio play productions with tactile physical components that arrive at your door. Take your place in every story!

Also upcoming from we Happy Few is SEX MONSTER a cabaret at Big Bear Cafe, 7pm on Aug 25. Find Tickers and info HERE

Jenna will be performing in The Boundary: A Life and Death Experience with Submersive Productions, September 1st through October 15th, on Fridays and Saturdays. Get Tickets  HERE

Jenna will also be performing in a staged reading of a new play called Garbage People written by Michael Perrie Jr. on Saturday, September 23rd at Chesapeake Arts Center in Columbia, MD

Instagram | @casio_dreams @jenarousity

Find The Standardized Patients Podcast at:
Instagram | @standardizedpatientspodcast
TikTok | @standardizedpatientspod

Surprise! We’ve been working all season to bring you this special episode! This one goes out to all our Med Students - we made this is episode just for you. We asked all our Season 2 guests if they could share one piece of advice with a medical student, what would it be? Join Host Katie Culligan on this clip-show inspired audio-adventure as we share and break down all our fabulous guests’ responses.

Find The Standardized Patients Podcast at:
Instagram | @standardizedpatientspodcast
TikTok | @standardizedpatientspod

TW: This week we are discussing FTA and their work, which involves the topics of Sexual Violence and Sexual Assault, and will come up in conversation during this episode. Please take care of yourself and mental welling being, if this topic is not comfortable for you, catch you next episode!

“Like Bones or NCIS?” - Not quite, but possibly just as exciting. This week we talk with Guest Julia Klavans a GTA & Forensic Training Associate (aka a FTA) who is on the cutting edge of this new Simulated Patient Field and at the forefront of developing standardized curriculum for SA Nurse Examiners and Advocates. Today we’ll learn a little more about her, what her work as an FTA entails, and while this new genre of SP is something we should have everywhere.

Julia Klavans (she/hers) is a Genitourinary Teaching Associate, Forensic Teaching Associate, Physical Exam Teaching Associate and Standardized Patient based in Southern California and the Washington DC Metro region. She has been active in the clinical skills field since 2015, when she first became a Standardized Patient as an extension of her work as a professional actor. Recently, Julia pioneered the first in-house training program for Forensic Teaching Associates at DC Forensic Nurse Examiners. Julia has presented her research at the International Association of Forensic Examiners and the Association for Standardized Patient Educators. Julia currently serves as Education Specialist in Clinical Skills at UC Irvine, and she is the founder of Best in Practice LLC, a company with the mission of providing custom-built, patient-centered training in forensic nursing and gynecological care. In her other life, Julia is an actor, dancer, singer, dramaturg, and intimacy choreographer.

Instagram | @juliaklavans

Who doesn’t love a part 2? We’re back again with Guest Jon Reynolds (who talked with us about a ‘normal’ SP day in Episode 12) and today we talk about what an Exam Day looks like for an SP, the people behinds the scenes to make exam days happen, and what makes these day different than a “typical” one.

Jon Reynolds (he/him) is an actor, deviser, designer, and playwright from Washington DC. He can be heard in We Happy Few's horror audioplay series A Midnight Dreary, The Tell Tale Heart; and also as Sherlock Holmes in We Happy Few's The Adventure of the Dancing Men and The Norwood Builder. On the DC stages he was last seen in Ada and the Engine (Avant Bard Theatre), Visions of Love (Pointless Theatre Co.), Pericles (We Happy Few), and Mnemonic (Theater Alliance). Other DC area credits include Beertown, A Killing Game, Courage, and Toast (dog & pony dc), Perfect Arrangement (Source), The Winter's Tale, As You Like It, and The Second Shepherds' Play (Folger Theatre), and Romeo & Juliet (The Shakespeare Theatre Company). Jon is a graduate of McDaniel College, MD.

Insatgram | @actorreynolds

Check out We Happy Few’s Audio Plays and Follow along mystery box experiences

Tap here https://www.wehappyfewdc.com/detectiveplays for more details.

This week we spotlight Guest Carol Randolph who runs workshops in the DMV area to help jumpstart the SP curious - by helping them find out if the work is right for them, about the job itself, and the ins and outs of getting started in Standardized Patient work.

Carol Randolph has worked as a Standardized Patient at several DC and Baltimore area med schools since 2007, including nine years' experience as a Physical Exam Teaching Associate (PETA) at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Silver Spring. Other role play work includes police training, crisis hotline calls and witnesses in mock trials. Carol's acting credits include performances at Olney Theatre, Shakespeare Theatre Co., 1st Stage, Chesapeake Shakespeare Co., and Maryland Ensemble Theatre--in addition to film and commercial work.

Where do the SP’s go when they’re not in an Encounter? **Welcome to the Jungle plays in the background** The Training Room! This week Guest Genevieve James talk to about the what goes down in the common spaces all SP’s wait, learn, get updates, and have fun.

Genevieve James is an actor born in Washington DC, where she also attended The Catholic University of America to earn her Bachelors of Music in Musical Theatre, and has performed at various theatres, mostly throughout the DMV area. She has been an SP\PETA since 2007, working with various medical schools and hospitals in DC and Baltimore. She lives in Arlington, VA, where she was raised, with her husband, 8 year-old child and very needy rescue poodle, Fionn McCool. 

We all know that great leaders and mentors lift us and our work up to another level, but in the SP world how do they get there, and what makes a great one? This we talk with Guest Erin Whalen on her journey from SP to SP Trainer, how she developed her leadership style, and how all her experiences eventually aligned that led to the creation of her business.

Erin Whalen has been a professional role player since 2006, as well as a Standardized Patient since 2009, primarily at George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences. She has been offered multiple training and facilitating opportunities at GW over the course of those 13 years, including developing and facilitating Communication Skills Workshops for medical students and training SPs for highly-emotional cases. In 2020, she founded her company, Compassionate Coaching, whose mission is to restore dignity to the grieving and the dying, and to help them feel seen and heard, by filling the cups of, and providing communication skills to, those who serve them. 

Instagram | @erin_compassionatecoaching
LinkedIn | Erin Whalen Compassionate Coaching

Learn more about Erin’s company Compassionate Coaching here

Erin & Compassionate Coaching have the following upcoming events!
Tu, 4/25 - Presenting Live Education Session “How Have You Have Been Cared For?” at the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization’s IDC 2023

Tu, 5/16 - Featured in Pro Aging Community's Webinar "How Can Role Playing and Playback Theatre Help Senior Living?"

Medical programs work hard to expose their students to a wide range of situations and patients in order to help prepare them for the real medical world - but what happens when there isn’t quite as wide a range of SPs to portray those cases? This week Guest Andrew Flurer talks with us about those times he’s had to perform an encounter that’s not believably in his age range (aka + or - 20 years, give or take) and how he channels Patients living through scenarios unlike what he’s experienced in life.

Andrew Flurer is now in his third and final year of his master’s program in clinical mental health counseling. After getting bachelor’s degrees in Theatre and Chemistry, Andrew worked as an actor in the DC area for a number of years. During this time, he started working as an SP at numerous local universities, and has now been an SP for almost 8 years! SP experience includes teaching physical exams, teaching genitourinary exams (GUTA), mass casualty and emergency response scenarios, and trauma-informed role-plays with social workers. His hobbies include cooking, pole dancing, lifting weights, and playing his Nintendo Switch.

We’ve talked to SPs, we’ve talked to PETAs, and even trainers SP Trainers but today we go one step further into the chain of learning - dun dun dunnnnn! This week we talk to Guest Mary Donovan the Assistant Dean for Standardized Patients & Experiential Learning at Georgetown University. We discuss with Mary her career journey, just what a Dean does for a SIM Center, and dive deeper into the genesis of SP Cases.

Mary Donovan is the Assistant Dean for Standardized Patients & Experiential Learning.  She has served at Georgetown as administrative director and educator for the Integrated Learning Center since 2007, providing SOM students with clinical learning and assessment opportunities through the methodologies of SP education and simulation.  Prior to Georgetown, she served as faculty instructor and senior SP trainer at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and academic-affairs staff at Johns Hopkins Medical School.  Prior to her work in med-ed experiential learning, she managed a forum of women in international trade and diplomacy, taught as adjunct faculty on Georgetown’s main campus in the mid-90s, served as marketing manager for a B2B organization, and as chapter liaison for a national trade association. In the early days of online journal search and retrieval, she worked as a researcher at the National Library of Medicine, Library of Congress and other libraries. While in college and beyond, she worked for the UVa Hospital Education system, teaching children from birth to age 21.

Mary presented (virtually) at the Ottawa Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as a finalist for the IMU-RHIME Award for Innovation in March of 2020, and won an innovation award for her presentation at the international Association for Standardized Patient Educators in 2011. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Health Design, based in Melbourne, Australia.  From 2016-18 she served as Chair for the Mid-Atlantic Consortium of med-school clinical-skills programs.  In 2016, GUMC honored her as a “bridge-builder” in the Ongoing Engagement and Consultation initiative. In June of 2023, she will co-present a session on challenges for med-students with disabilities at the International Association of Medical Science Educators' annual conference.

She received her BA in English from University of Virginia, MA in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University and MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Mary recently portrayed a palliative-care doctor in an in-house NIH training video for palliative fellows (along with some familiar SP talents). She is thrilled to have become a Great-Aunt Mary a few weeks ago, to twins Arthur and Eva in Louisville. 

Please check out Mary’s blog Muffin, None the Wiser she started during the pandemic!

Instagram | @maryfdonz
Facebook | Mary Donovan
LinkedIn | Mary Donovan
Blog: Muffin, None the Wiser | https://www.marymuffindonovan.com/