Teaching resident physicians chronic disease management: simulating a 10-year longitudinal clinical experience with a standardized dementia patient and caregiver.

Background: Education for all physicians should include specialty-specific geriatrics-related and chronic disease-related topics.

Objective: We describe the development, implementation, and evaluation of a chronic disease/geriatric medicine curriculum designed to teach Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education core competencies and geriatric medicine competencies to residents by using longitudinal encounters with a standardized dementia patient and her caregiver daughter.

Intervention: Over 3 half-day sessions, the unfolding standardized patient (SP) case portrays the progressive course of dementia and simulates a 10-year longitudinal clinical experience between residents and a patient with dementia and her daughter. A total of 134 residents participated in the University of Cincinnati-based curriculum during 2007-2010, 72% of whom were from internal medicine (79) or family medicine (17) residency programs. Seventy-five percent of participants (100) said they intended to provide primary care to older adults in future practice, yet 54% (73) had little or no experience providing medical care to older adults with dementia.

Results: Significant improvements in resident proficiency were observed for all self-reported skill items. SPs' evaluations revealed that residents' use of patient-centered language and professionalism significantly improved over the 3 weekly visits. Nearly all participants agreed that the experience enhanced clinical competency in the care of older adults and rated the program as "excellent" or "above average" compared to other learning activities.

Conclusions: Residents found this SP-based curriculum using a longitudinal dementia case realistic and valuable. Residents improved in both self-perceived knowledge of dementia and the use of patient-centered language and professionalism.