The Use of Standardized Clients in Research in the Veterinary Clinical Setting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article describes the first use of undisclosed standardized clients (SCs) for research in the veterinary clinical setting. The study described here used SCs to investigate veterinarian-client communication during euthanasia discussions. Use of this methodology allowed us to avoid several ethical and logistical challenges associated with gathering observational data on sensitive subject matter. In medicine, standardized patients (SPs) are used extensively in teaching, medical school examinations, and licensing examinations. Increasingly, SPs are being used in research to evaluate physicians' performance in the clinical setting, including assessment of physician-patient communication. Several veterinary schools have recently introduced SCs for teaching and evaluation of student veterinarians. Until now, however, SCs have not been used for research in the veterinary clinical setting. Two cases were designed to reflect common reasons for discussion of euthanasia in private practice. A random sample of 32 consenting veterinarians in southern Ontario saw each case. Appointments were audio-recorded and analyzed using a communication assessment tool adapted from human medicine. At the end of each appointment, the SC disclosed his or her identity and both veterinarian and SC completed questionnaires to describe their perceptions of the communication that took place. This article describes in detail the use of SCs in this study, including case design, training, preparation for visits, use of animal patients, and challenges faced. The use of SCs was shown to be a feasible method of assessing veterinarian-client communication in the clinical setting.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".