Healthcare Theater

Course Description

Healthcare Theater has students develop performance skills through research, acting, and improvisational activities. The course focuses on portraying patients, family members, and healthcare providers in simulation settings, and on analysing diverse human perspectives to perform as standardized patients in healthcare field experiences.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, TPP is the Theatre Performance prefix and the C suffix marks a combined lecture-and-laboratory course. Daytona State publishes this at 3 credits, offered fall and spring.

This is one of the more genuinely useful courses in this repository, and students consistently underestimate it. Standardised patient work is paid, local, and in continuous demand wherever health professions are taught — and the skill it requires is unusual: not the most compelling performance, but the most exactly reproducible one. A standardised patient who plays the same case slightly differently for each student has invalidated the assessment. The discipline is consistency under repetition, which is not what most acting training optimises for.

Daytona State does not publish a lecture and laboratory split for its performing arts courses. The applied and studio courses in these prefixes run at approximately 20 contact hours per credit — TPP1110 (Acting 1) and MUM1622 (Sound Reinforcement) are both live at 3 credits and 60 hours. This course is a studio or applied course and is priced at that convention.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the role of simulation in health professions education.
• Describe what a standardized patient is and what the role requires.
• Research a clinical case and its presentation accurately.
• Describe the condition being portrayed at a level sufficient for consistent performance.
• Portray physical signs and symptoms plausibly and safely.
• Portray emotional and psychological states truthfully.
• Maintain consistency of portrayal across repeated encounters.
• Stay in role while responding to unscripted questions.
• Improvise within the boundaries of the case.
• Recognise when to break role and do so appropriately.
• Portray family members and healthcare providers as required.
• Analyse and represent perspectives different from your own.
• Represent patients of differing backgrounds respectfully and without caricature.
• Describe how communication affects clinical encounters.
• Observe and record a learner's communication behaviours accurately.
• Complete assessment checklists reliably.
• Give constructive verbal feedback to a learner.
• Describe feedback that is specific, behavioural, and usable.
• Maintain confidentiality regarding learner performance.
• Describe professional conduct expectations in a clinical education setting.
• Recognise the emotional demands of the role and manage them.
• Apply a practice for leaving a difficult role behind.
• Work collaboratively with faculty and simulation staff.
• Describe employment pathways in standardized patient work.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe simulation technology and manikin-based simulation.
• Describe objective structured clinical examinations.
• Describe simulation for interprofessional education.
• Describe applied theatre and its wider uses.
• Describe training and standards for standardized patient educators.
• Perform in a public health or community education context.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Simulation in health professions education
• The standardized patient role
• Case research
• Understanding the condition portrayed
• Portraying physical signs safely
• Portraying emotional states
• Consistency across encounters
• Staying in role
• Bounded improvisation
• Breaking role appropriately
• Portraying family and providers
• Representing other perspectives
• Respectful portrayal without caricature
• Communication in clinical encounters
• Observing learner behaviour
• Assessment checklists
• Giving verbal feedback
• Specific, behavioural feedback
• Confidentiality of learner performance
• Professional conduct in clinical education
• Emotional demands of the role
• De-roling practice
• Working with faculty and simulation staff
• Employment pathways

Optional Topics

• Simulation technology and manikins
• Objective structured clinical examinations
• Interprofessional simulation
• Applied theatre
• Standardized patient educator standards
• Community and public health performance

Resources & Tools

• Your department's productions — audition, crew, and stage manage. Practical production credit is what the field actually recruits on, and it is free and available now.
• Recordings of professional work — many companies and archives stream productions, and college libraries frequently carry theatre and dance video databases at no cost to students.
• Your college's counselling and health services — free and confidential; relevant to a field with real physical and emotional demands.
• Local and regional companies — volunteering, ushering, or crewing gets you inside a working organisation and in front of people who hire.
• Florida's theme park and cruise line auditions — posted publicly and held regularly; substantial, steady, paid performance work that many students never think to pursue.
• Actors' Equity Association, SAG-AFTRA, and IATSE — the professional unions; understand what membership means and when it makes sense before you are eligible.
• Keep a portfolio from the first term — video, photographs, programmes, and a maintained resume.
• Association of Standardized Patient Educators (aspeducators.org) — the professional body; its free standards of best practice describe exactly what this work requires.
• Your local health professions programmes — nursing, medicine, physician assistant, physical therapy, and dental programmes all hire standardized patients; ask the simulation centre directly, because the work is rarely advertised widely.
• Society for Simulation in Healthcare (ssih.org) — the wider professional field, and a route into simulation operations work.

Career Pathways

• Actor — SOC 27-2011.
• Dancer — SOC 27-2031; and choreographer, SOC 27-2032.
• Producer and director — SOC 27-2012.
• Stage manager and production management — consistently more employable than performance and frequently overlooked by students.
• Technical theatre — lighting, sound, scenery, costume, and rigging; steady work and transferable to live events.
• Theme park and cruise line entertainment — a major Florida employer of performers, technicians, and stage management.
• Live events, corporate production, and conference work — large, year-round, and well paid.
• Teaching artist, studio instruction, and K-12 arts teaching — the latter requires teacher certification.
• Arts administration, marketing, and development — every company needs these and they are steadier than performance.
• Applied and healthcare performance work — standardised patient programmes, simulation, and training scenarios; paid, local, and genuinely available.
• Transfer to a bachelor's programme in theatre, dance, or musical theatre.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Consistency is the skill — this is assessment, not performance

• A standardized patient encounter is frequently a graded examination for the student across the table, and their progression can depend on it. That changes the nature of the work entirely.
• ⚠ The same case must be played the same way every time. Giving one student a fuller answer, an extra hint, or a warmer manner than another makes the assessment unfair and the data useless — and the temptation to help a struggling student is strong and must be resisted.
• Answer what is asked, not what you wish had been asked. Volunteering information the student failed to elicit removes exactly what was being measured.
• Learn the case thoroughly enough to improvise within it. Students ask unpredictable questions, and the answer must be consistent with the case rather than invented.
• Observe accurately while performing. You are simultaneously the patient and the recorder, and the checklist must reflect what happened rather than an overall impression.
• ⚠ Confidentiality applies to learner performance. What a student did in an encounter is not discussed outside the process — not with other students, not socially, not anywhere.
• Give feedback on behaviour, not on the person. "You looked at the screen while I was describing my pain" is usable; "you seemed uncaring" is not.
• Break role if a learner is genuinely distressed or if safety requires it, and know the procedure for doing so.

⚠ Portraying illness has a cost — plan for it

• Repeatedly portraying pain, fear, grief, or receiving bad news has a real effect, and it accumulates across a day of encounters in a way a single performance does not.
• ⚠ De-role deliberately at the end of each session. A physical and verbal practice for stepping out of the character is standard in this field for good reason — it is not fussiness, it is occupational hygiene.
• Be honest with yourself about cases that touch your own experience. If a case resembles something you have lived through, say so before rather than after — simulation programmes will assign you elsewhere without difficulty.
• Take the breaks. Encounter days are scheduled with recovery time built in for a reason.
• Portray conditions respectfully. Real people live with what you are representing, and caricature is both unprofessional and pedagogically useless.
• ⚠ Do not portray physical signs in ways that could hurt you — sustained abnormal positions, breath-holding, or genuine strain. Ask how a sign is safely simulated.
• Use your college's counselling services if the work is affecting you. They are free and confidential.
• Talk to the other standardized patients. It is a small professional community and an unusually supportive one.

⚠⚠ Consent and boundaries in rehearsal — the standards have changed and they matter

• Performance work involves physical contact, physical closeness, and emotionally exposing material, and the profession's standards for how that is handled have changed substantially and for the better in recent years.
• Contact should be choreographed, discussed in advance, and agreed — not discovered in the moment. Spontaneity is not a justification for surprising a scene partner with touch.
• ⚠ You may decline. Saying that a piece of staging is not something you are willing to do is a professional statement, not a failure of commitment, and a good rehearsal room makes that easy to say.
• Intimacy direction exists as a discipline precisely because scenes involving intimacy need the same deliberate choreography that stage violence does.
• Check in during and after emotionally demanding work, and treat that as ordinary practice rather than fuss.
• ⚠ De-role deliberately. Learn a practice for leaving a character behind at the end of a session — particularly with distressing material. Actors who never learned this carry work home for years.
• Raise concerns with the instructor or director, and know your institution's reporting routes if that is not possible.
• Extend the same care to others. The person who makes a rehearsal room safe to speak up in is usually a peer rather than the person in charge.

⚠ An honest account of performing arts employment

• Performance work is intermittent, competitive, and unevenly paid, and most people who work in it also do other things. That is the normal shape of the career rather than a sign of failure, and knowing it in advance changes how you plan.
• Build the second and third skill deliberately. Teaching, stage management, technical work, arts administration, choreography, and directing are all adjacent, and the people who sustain careers in this field are usually the ones who can do several things.
• The transferable skills are real and employers value them — public presentation, collaboration under pressure, taking direction and criticism, meeting immovable deadlines, and performing when unwell or unprepared. Name them explicitly when applying for anything.
• Florida has a genuine market: theme parks and cruise lines are substantial and year-round employers of performers, technicians, and stage management, alongside regional theatre, education, and events. It is not New York, and it is a great deal steadier than New York.
• Learn the business side early — contracts, self-employment tax, invoicing, and keeping records. Most performers learn this the hard way.
• ⚠ Unpaid work has a place and it has limits. Student and community work builds craft and contacts; a professional production expecting free labour is a different matter.
• Keep documentation of everything you do — recordings, photographs, programmes, reviews. A portfolio is built continuously and cannot be assembled retrospectively.
• Health insurance and income stability deserve a plan, not optimism.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

TPP1200C is a combined lecture-and-laboratory course, published at 3 credits and approximately 60 contact hours, offered fall and spring at Daytona State.

⚠ Ask the simulation centre about paid standardized patient work. It is one of the few genuinely available paid performance opportunities open to students, and it rarely gets advertised.