Emerging patient roles outside of the care giving setting include their input to healthcare policy and practice. Patient narratives enrich education by humanizing illness, create a symbiotic relationship between learner and patient to help train empathic physicians by shaping their professional identity. Early patient contact can generate an emotional response that can be harnessed as trigger for their professional identity development in a controlled learning environment through specific educational strategies. Humanizing illness through patient narratives can promote patient-centered, empathic attitudes in learners. In this context the PAT's expert "lived-in" experience is an important teaching modality. The need is further delineated by the recent addition of psycho-social curriculum to the self-study questions by US and Canada, Liaison Committee on Medical Education, accreditation committee. However, patient narratives are sub-optimally utilized across health profession curricula.

At the end of the focus group session participants will be able to:
1. Summarize the difference between working with patients in a care giving setting and as partners in teaching
2. Compare and contrast the advantages of using patient narratives to teach learners about psycho-social aspects of disease as opposed (an applied approach) to a didactic session (passive approach)
3. Discuss the basis of how this instructional tool helps shape the professional identity of the learner
4. Identify three didactic do's and don'ts related to setting up sessions using patients as teachers
5. Describe the opportunities, pitfalls and take-home messages as discussed from the PAT demonstration