Empathy in Training: Kerry Tribe’s “Standardized Patient” by Rachel Heidenry
Can empathy be taught? The Los Angeles–based artist and filmmaker Kerry Tribe ponders this question in her most recent video installation, “Standardized Patient.” The work examines the relationship between doctors and patients—or, more accurately, between medical students and actors playing patients.
Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for its “New Work” series, Standardized Patient depicts a number of “Objective Structured Clinical Examinations” (OSCEs). In these simulated clinical environments, medical students practice communication skills with patients portrayed by professional actors known as “Standardized Patients” (SPs). The students take the SPs’ medical histories, ask about symptoms, offer diagnoses, and give recommendations, all the while being watched by professors, who later give feedback.
Tribe’s work evolved from her collaboration with and study of professional clinicians, communication experts, and SPs at Stanford University and the University of Southern California (USC). For this video, Tribe developed four case studies and filled the roles with USC staff participants, medical students, and SPs trained to portray both patient and student characters.
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