Academic psychiatry : the journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Training and validation of standardized patients for unannounced assessment of physicians' management of depression.
Standardized patients (SPs) have been developed to measure practitioner performance in actual practice settings, but results have not been fully validated for psychiatric disorders. This study describes the process of creating reliable and valid SPs for unannounced assessment of general-practitioners' management of depression disorders in Iran. ⋯ The authors have demonstrated a thorough validation of the technique of using standardized patients in the portrayal of depressive disorders in primary-care settings in Iran, which creates confidence in employing this technique to evaluate doctors' performance, for example, after an educational intervention. Similar methods of validation can be used for SPs' portrayal of other psychiatric disorders.