UALR Spotlight: Mary Cantrell
June 23-29, 2014
UALR Spotlight: Mary Cantrell
By Becca Bona
For Mary Cantrell, executive director of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Clinical Skills Center, making the leap from theatre to medical education was a natural step. After attending the University of Arkansas at Little Rock as an undergraduate and studying theatre, she was in the process of working odd jobs and trying to find her niche in life while simultaneously balancing the act of single motherhood.
A phone call from a UAMS doctor and friend would change all that.
“I remember, he asked, ‘Can you feign some illnesses for us?’ And I said, cool, how much does it pay,” Cantrell said. Hired on a contract basis, Cantrell began to thoroughly enjoy creating various patient scenarios as needed. She didn’t know it then, but she had stumbled upon her career.
“I’d bring in some theatre friends and we would figure out some illnesses we could feign, and so they actually hired me for a small project, and then later I went on full-time,” she said.
As she spent more time within the halls of UAMS, she decided she wanted to go back to school and get a master’s. Her experience with hospital personnel, everyone from doctors to nurses to pharmacists, mixed with her experience as a patient, acted as an impetus for her to specialize.
“I really want to study doctor/patient relationships because that’s what I was doing with my projects,” she explained, “there is no other communication dynamic like a doctor/patient relationship.
She was immediately immersed in an emerging field. “What happened was that I became the go-to person when people were having trouble communicating with patients, or having trouble communicating with nurses or other healthcare professionals,” she explained. The creative soul had to start fresh with her learning knowledge, studying medical ailments and reading medical papers as they affected her angle on communication.
Throughout this time, she was able to make wonderful mentors through both her UALR and UAMS connections. “I knew nothing, so I was starting from the ground-up, but I had some incredible mentors like Dr. Jeanne Heard who’s now (the UAMS) provost, and Linda Pledger who was my professor at UALR.”
When UAMS hired Cantrell full-time she was integral in creating the standardized patient program, working alongside Dr. Heard. Throughout the two decades that Cantrell has put energy into the program, she has moved up to executive director. She wouldn’t want to be working anywhere else, which is evident from her contagious enthusiasm on the subject.
“I have the coolest job at UAMS. I really feel like I’ve been given this bird’s eye view of the patient and physician interaction,” she said.
The standardized patient program exists to provide a simulated educational experience for medical students. Non-healthcare professionals come in as a ‘patient’ and participate in various activities designed around communication and learning.
Cantrell explained the process of becoming a patient: “It’s very simple, you just call us, and we type-cast. The best quality you can have as a standardized patient is that you are intelligent and you understand that what we’re doing is teaching, and you’re on time.”
Beyond benefiting medical students, the program has had a positive effect on the community. Cantrell said, “What has happened is that we have an entire community in Central Arkansas who are learning about their health through becoming a standardized patient, and they become very empowered.”
Simple tasks such as writing out medications before visiting the doctor, or even listening to a dietician and taking recommended steps into their own personal lives are among the many that Cantrell and her team have seen standardized patients take on over the years.
Managing standardized patients is not all Cantrell oversees, as she is also heavily involved in Objective Structured Clinical Examinations, known in the medical world as OSCEs.
Cantrell remembers when she first began working on OSCEs: “I had to study … What I figured out was, it was just like putting on a play. It was great. You cast these patients, you rehearse the patients, you put them all in their little room, and then the play starts,” she laughed.
These patient simulations run the gamut, and each one is determined by a specific objective. Sometimes live patients are used, and other times mannequins are involved in the objective. Contrary to popular belief, the goal is not to confuse students or stump them, but rather to create a situation for them to succeed.
“Everybody gets a chance to think. And because of things like simulation, young medical professionals are trained to say ‘timeout,’” she said.
Patient simulation is on the rise in medical education to help prevent the thousands of deaths that occur in hospitals each year due to human error. A report put out by the Institute of Medicine titled “To Err is Human” details the exact numbers of deaths through human error, and ways to prevent this.
“Because of this report, simulation is on the rise because one of the things they say is the way to prevent this is through simulation. It’s not the end-all be-all of education, but it is really relevant,” Cantrell detailed.
UAMS has truly put some energy into creating and cultivating this program. Cantrell said, “I have to give credit to the university,” mentioning Dr. Heard and countless others for foreseeing that education through simulation needed one central hub on campus. The facility has grown and the team as well, as Cantrell said, “We’ve got an amazing team of 13 people that really pour everything into making it happen here.”
From a student’s point of view, she and her team hear positive feedback constantly. “That’s always the thing that is the icing on the cake for us is that our students get it and they do learn and they do understand and they make connections with people. … That’s a great thing.”
In terms of advice for young professionals, medical students and those interested in communications or theatre alike, Cantrell offered solid words for how to measure success. “I would say, if you can do what you love to do and get paid for it you are successful.”
She herself combined two seemingly unrelated fields, theatre and communications with medical education, and she lives her own advice day-to-day.
She said it best: “I knew that this is the work I would do, this made sense to me in my core.”
For more information on the UAMS Clinical Skills Center visit: http://medicalsim.uams.edu/.
