Review of the use of standardized patients in speech-language pathology clinical education

Allied health programmes worldwide have reported increasing difficulty in finding sufficient traditional clinical placements for students within the workplace. As a result, some programmes are taking alternative approaches to clinical training. One such approach is to use standardized patients. A standardized patient is an individual trained to portray a specific clinical case in a highly consistent and measurable manner. The use of standardized patients in speech-language pathology clinical education has been limited. The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of standardized patients and objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) to train and assess students in speech-language pathology. The limited literature on the use of standardized patients and OSCEs in speech-language pathology is reviewed, and a call is made for further research into the use of standardized patients and OSCEs for clinical education and assessment.