Lead Author: Adam Kronish, MD
Submitted by: Amy Lorion, NBOME

Kronish, et al. note that, because of an increase in hospitalizations for mental illness, children and adolescents in need of psychiatric care are increasingly being admitted into general pediatric wards until beds in psychiatric wards are available, creating a need for staff outside of psychiatric wards to be trained in how to respond to “escalations due to dysregulated behavior.” Accordingly, they designed a study to train residents in how to deal with an adolescent patient who becomes “acutely agitated with aggressive behaviors.” They opted for “a standardized patient (SP) case as the teaching method to immerse the learner and evoke authentic emotional and physical reactions to this difficult scenario.” Based on results from 22 residents, the authors found that they had “effectively evaluated learner self-efficacy, with residents expressing an aggregate increase in confidence in their own knowledge and abilities.”

Read the full article in the AAMC Journal of Teaching and Learning Resources here.

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