Wayne State University School of Medicine staff member Simone Brennan received a 2014 Project Award, a $2,000 grant over two years, from the Association of Standardized Patient Educators for her upcoming project, "Standardized Patients as Change Agents: Recognizing the Patient Voice in Patient Centered Communication."

Brennan is assistant director of Clinical Evaluation for the School of Medicine's Kado Family Clinical Skills Center, where she writes cases for standardized patient encounters, integrates communication curriculum in high-fidelity simulation training experiences and works with faculty in developing training and assessment tools that support and enhance the school's core curricula.

Standardized patients portray the role of a patient with a specific medical history and physical condition. Depending on the scenario, they may provide constructive feedback to the medical student from the patient's point of view or assess student performance.

Brennan, who has worked at WSU for more than 20 years, joined the School of Medicine staff seven years ago.

"Through this funding, I am able to hopefully give back to the university, strengthening our medical educational programs and advancing understandings of how we can continue to improve patient-centered communication, which has been shown through many previous research endeavors to result in higher satisfaction for patients and physicians alike, as well as enhance health outcomes for patients," she said.

Brennan also is a student in the WSU College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts' Department of Communication. She is pursuing a doctorate degree in health communication, with a focus on improving patient-provider communication via the modalities with which learners are trained to communicate with patients. The project is her dissertation.

"I am using archival video tapes from a project I did here at the School of Medicine with WSU Graduate Medical Education residents, and I will be engaging with the standardized patients who work here at Kado, so it is both work and Ph.D.-related," Brennan said.

She will receive the award and present her project at ASPE's 2014 annual meeting in Indianapolis in June.

"I can only hope that my research will help strengthen current understandings of best approaches to patient communication. To the best of my knowledge, there is no previous research that has looked at patient-centered care from the layperson perspective. Standardized patients have the potential for offering really unique insights into patient-centered care, as they serve as quasi-insiders to medical educational practices, but maintain this stance from that non-clinically trained perspective," she said.

She anticipates the project will take most of this year, with final analysis and preliminary presentations and publications coming out in 2015.

"I am honestly so lucky; I really love working in the Kado Clinical Skills Center, with the students, residents, faculty, staff and standardized patients. I have received incredible support from my supervisor, Ron Spalding, and SOM administration, as they have fully supported and encouraged my desire to combine my work efforts with my scholarly efforts," she said. "And on the academic side, I am fortunate to study through a department and have an advisor, Julie Novak, and dissertation committee who have the expertise to uniquely support my research goals and provide the necessary resources for me to develop myself as a scholar."