Where Does It Hurt?

“Does it hurt all over, or in one place?” asks the nurse practitioner.

“Yesterday it hurt all over, but now it hurts mostly on my right side,” says Andrew.

Andrew’s real name is Azriel Perez ’26. He’s one of eight theater majors hired to feign illness for the Family Nurse Practitioner DNP program at USF.

“It’s called clinical acting,” said Ken Sonkin, adjunct professor of performing arts and social justice. Clinical actors perform on site in nursing schools, medical schools, law schools, law firms, police academies, and corporations. They get paid to bring case studies to life.

Jo Loomis and Ricky Norwood, professors in the School of Nursing and Health Professions, asked Sonkin this semester to hire the theater students to act as patients in the Advanced Physical Assessment and Health Promotion graduate course. 

“During the pandemic, when classes went remote and just as computers and artificial intelligence were on the rise in health care, we as a society lost a few years of hands-on, person-to-person training,” Sonkin said. “At USF, we want our nursing students to develop those people skills because they’re critical for health care.”

To prepare for performance, each clinical actor reads a case brief written by Loomis or Norwood. The brief gives the patient’s age, background, and symptoms.

Andrew, 15, has a sore stomach. April, 18, has a rapid heartbeat. Zelda, 45, struggles to breathe. Melinda, 15, has bloodshot eyes.

Each clinical actor meets with a nurse practitioner student in an examination room. The appointment is captured on camera. The student’s professor, classmates, and Sonkin sit in a classroom nearby, watching on a large screen.

After the appointment, the DNP student and the clinical actor return to the classroom for feedback. Classmates and professors weigh in. The clinical actor gives feedback, too.

“I liked that you treated me as an adult but also that you nurtured me,” Azriel Perez said to Lyn Green DNP ’27. “Some of the words you said, I didn’t know what they meant, but I did know that you cared about me.”

Sonkin offered this: “Instead of saying, ‘We’re going to send you to the emergency room,’ might you say, ‘As a next step, we’re going to have you and your mom go to the hospital so a doctor can examine you’?”

“Good call,” Green replied. “‘Hospital’ sounds less scary than ‘emergency room.’”

This collaboration across schools is a win-win, Sonkin said. “The nursing students get to practice with real humans before they see real patients, and the theater students get to practice creating characters and acting on camera.”

This DNP class is all about listening to patients, Loomis said. “You want to be thorough in your questions and rigorous in your assessment, but you also want to be caring. The patient isn’t just a set of symptoms; the patient is a person.”