The ASHA Leader recently interviewed department Chair Richard Zraick for a feature article on ways to increase clinical training opportunities for graduate students in communication sciences and disorders.
In a section titled “I’m not a patient, but I play one on TV,” author Carol Polovoy writes about Zraick’s use of standardized patients to develop “students’ professional communication skills, diagnostic ability and interprofessional collaboration competencies.”
She also writes, “Counting standardized patients in clock hours could ‘absolutely’ increase capacity in graduate training programs, Zraick believes, because many more students could participate in these clinical experiences. It would also be helpful to small programs that don’t have robust clinics and, therefore, don’t have a broad patient population, especially for low-incidence disorders.”
