A Virtual Adolescent Patient with PTSD for Training Psychiatrists

Objective: The objective of this study is to pilot a virtual adolescent patient (VP) with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to determine its feasibility and effectiveness as a tool to enhance psychiatric trainees ’ skills in interviewing PTSD patients and their knowledge of this disorder. Background: Effective interviewing skills are a core competency for psychiatry residents, child and adolescent psychiatry residents and medical students and are essential in the assessment of posttraumatic stress syndromes during which sensitive clinical information may be challenging to elicit from adolescent patients. The goals of utilizing a virtual adolescent patient with natural language and voice recognition capabilities are to provide a standardized educational experience for trainees in which knowledge of PTSD, sensitivity of the interviewer and effectiveness of interviewers ’ questions in eliciting diagnostic information are recorded and immediate feedback regarding the efficacy of the interview is available. “Standardized patients”(SP), hired actors to portray patients with given medical and mental health problems, are routinely used in medical training, including psychiatry clerkships to evaluate students’ clinical skills in a timed examination called the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) (Hanson et al. 1998). While standardized patients are often utilized to teach interview skills, the diversity of the scenarios depicted are limited by the availability of human actors and their skills. This becomes an even greater challenge when the actor needs to be an adolescent. The potential use of computer generated virtual humans as standardized virtua