The educational value of improvisational actors to teach communication and relational skills: perspectives of interprofessional learners, faculty, and actors.

Objective: To assess the educational value of improvisational actors in difficult conversation simulations to teach communication and relational skills to interprofessional learners.

Methods: Surveys of 192 interprofessional health care professionals, and 33 teaching faculty, and semi-structured interviews of 10 actors. Descriptive statistics, Fisher's exact test and chi-square test were used for quantitative analyses, and the Crabtree and Miller approach was used for qualitative analyses.

Integrating actors into a simulation program: a primer.

We describe our more than 10 years' experience working with actors and provide a "how-to" guide to recruiting, auditioning, hiring, training, and mentoring actors for work as simulated patients in simulation programs. We contend that trained actors add great realism, richness, and depth to simulation-based training programs. The actors experience satisfaction from their contributions, and their skill and improvisational talent allow programs to offer ethical and relational training, customized to a wide range of practitioners and adapted across a variety of health care conversations.