History In 2009, the University of Georgia and Augusta University opened the AU/UGA Medical Partnership, a new medical school campus in Athens, Georgia. In preparation for this, Dr. Stephen Goggins, the director of the new clinical training curriculum, contacted Dr. David Saltz, then head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, to explore ways to leverage UGA’s unique resources as a professional training program for actors. Soon after, Dr. Saltz received funding from the Graduate School to employ MFA acting and PhD students to develop a new program to train simulated patients as an integral part of the first- and second-year medical clinical coursework. Saltz and his team of Theatre graduate students trained volunteer community members to portray simulated patients in encounters with the medical students and also taught a special course for advanced undergraduate acting students, training them to perform as SPs for more complex and challenging cases, both physically and emotionally. After the first year, it was clear this novel program was effective and transformative. In 2011, Dr. Goggans and Dr. Saltz worked with Dr. Gerald Crites to conduct a study that provided evidence that the new approach produces more authentic encounters than the approach most commonly employed to train SPs around the country. From the start, the philosophy of the simulated patient program was to move beyond the patient standardization methods that have dominated the field. Theatre professor George Contini, with the support of graduate assistants, also provided communications workshops for medical students on the verbal and non-verbal cues they convey to patients. In 2014, Professor T. Anthony Marotta began working with Dr. Meredith Welch-Devine as part of a multi-disciplinary approach in teaching graduate students in the Science and Communication course. The course is designed around science communication techniques developed at the Alan Alda Center at Stony Brook University. Marotta uses improvisation techniques to help students in the sciences effectively communicate their research to experts and laypeople in media, government, social media, and more. This course has also been popular with graduate students outside of the sciences who seek to communicate their research more effectively. In 2016, as UGA’s College of Pharmacy launched its communications program, our SP training program worked in tandem to train actors for their own standardized patient encounters. In 2017, we began working with UGA’s College of Veterinary Medicine to develop its simulated client encounter experiences. As the veterinary school continues to grow its communications program, we also lead customized communications workshops with vet students. In 2019, the medical partnership pivoted to a program with paid standardized patients, with the undergraduate students in the course still participating in the more challenging cases. The use of standardized patients meant more rigid training requirements to ensure consistency from patient to patient and from encounter to encounter. The medical partnership and theatre continue to value the benefits of challenging students to react and respond in the moment to the individual actor-as-patient. In 2020, the Department of Theatre and Film teamed up with the College of Veterinary Medicine and the School of Social Work and received a Diversity Research and Scholarship Grant to study implicit bias in simulated client interactions. This study is ongoing. Recognizing the growing need for actors who can role play with students across all professional disciplines, in 2023 leadership within the College of Pharmacy, the College of Veterinary Medicine, and Franklin College of Arts and Sciences came together to establish the Advanced Communication Training Resource (ACTR) program, through which hiring and training of actors portraying standardized/simulated patients, clients, etc., would be centered in the Theatre and Film Studies Department. Franklin College created a new full-time faculty position to serve as Managing Director the ACTR program, hiring Dr. Jennifer Marks, who had nearly a decade’s experience working in the program while pursuing her PhD. Dr. Marks coordinates and participates in the day-to-day activities of the program, while Dr. Saltz continues on as ACTR’s Executive Director. The establishment of this new official program is the next step in providing resources needed for students across a wide range of disciplines to practice various skills in a real-world setting. As it has from the very beginning, the ACTR program continues to train and provide actors for role-play exercises and graded encounters as well as provide program development and student workshops. Our cohort of actors is built from both community members and students from our Performance and Simulation course. We also work with departments and colleges to train their in-house actors. For example, because of their work with human medicine, the medical partnership continues to hire their actors separately so they can fit specific physical parameters. We continued training their standardized patients as we have done since 2009. In 2024, UGA announced that it will separate from Augusta University, establishing its own medical school, the UGA School of Medicine. This event has placed our collaboration on hold for a year while the new medical school establishes its teaching and research objectives. We look forward to continuing our work with them come 2025-2026 as we welcome the UGA School of Medicine into the university community.
