Nursing Alumni as Standardized Patients: An Untapped Resource

With the current educational shift toward student-centered learning, nurse faculty are being encouraged to include interactive approaches to learning while incorporating realistic clinical scenarios. Nurse educators are challenged to develop experiential learning strategies that support students' transition to the clinical setting while ensuring they will become safe and competent practitioners prepared for the advances in nursing practice (Oermann & Gaberson, 2006). As hospital stays shorten and competition for clinical placements increases, fewer opportunities exist for students to interact and practice effective communication skills with real patients (Webster, Seldomridge, & Rockelli, 2012). Incorporating standardized patient (SP) experiences with trained actors into clinical instruction is increasingly used as a strategy for overcoming these challenges in undergraduate nursing programs (Anderson, Holmes, LeFlore, Nelson, & Jenkins, 2010). We propose recruiting nursing alumni, rather than hired actors, for SP experiences. This article will describe the process of developing an SP program, including strategies to recruit local alumni as volunteers, methods to integrate SP experiences into the undergraduate curriculum, and suggestions for evaluating and sustaining an SP program.