Creating the Simulated Patient Through Dialogue: An Approach Based on Bakhtin’s Dialogical Thinking

Abstract

Simulated patients (SP) are being used in medical communication training worldwide. The character of an SP will be trained in advance. However, the dialogue with the student is never fully predictable. The aim of this study was to explore the impromptu interaction between the student and the SP with a focus on the in situ building of the SP’s character. Three features from Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance — addressivity, change of speaking subjects and finalisation — were applied in an abductive analytic approach. We found that the impromptu dialogue between the SP and the student provided different possibilities that may stimulate the creative process in SP character-building. The appliance of the dialogue as part of the simulated character-building may strengthen the simulation and thereby increases students’ learning outcomes.