PRPlayers

Delivering Professional Role Play for High-Stakes Clinical Assessments

Client Overview

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) is a world-renowned professional body dedicated to improving women’s healthcare through training, education, and clinical excellence. RCOG sets the standards for specialist education and runs rigorous national examinations, including the MRCOG Part 3 Clinical Assessment, which evaluates candidates' ability to apply clinical knowledge, demonstrate communication skills, and manage complex patient interactions.

Challenge

RCOG needed a trusted partner to provide professional, standardised role players for their MRCOG Part 3 examinations. The challenge was to ensure:

• Realistic and emotionally credible portrayals of patients, relatives, and healthcare professionals across a variety of sensitive and high-pressure obstetrics and gynaecology scenarios

• Consistency across all circuits and candidates, ensuring fairness and reliability

• Sensitive handling of highly emotive and complex topics (e.g., miscarriage, maternal death, communication with distressed patients)

• Strict adherence to the confidentiality and integrity standards required for high-stakes assessments

The exams demanded actors capable of portraying not only patient histories and symptoms but also the emotional weight and cultural sensitivities often encountered in obstetric and gynaecological practice.

Solution

PRP worked closely with RCOG to meet these requirements by:

• Recruiting and training experienced medical role players, highly skilled at handling sensitive material with professionalism and emotional authenticity

• Providing scenario-specific briefings to ensure consistent, realistic portrayals across all exam stations

• Preparing role players to portray patients, partners, and healthcare professionals, depending on the station requirement

• Emphasising standardisation techniques to ensure every candidate experienced a consistent and fair interaction

• Equipping all role players with the skills to adjust tone, delivery, and timing precisely to the exam structure and expectations

In addition, PRP provided operational flexibility to accommodate both face-to-face and virtual assessments during the pandemic, ensuring continuity in examination delivery.

Results

• High-quality, consistent role play across multiple examination sittings

• Positive feedback from examiners highlighting the realism, emotional appropriateness, and standardisation of performances

• Support for virtual assessment formats when needed, and a smooth transition back to face-to-face examinations post-pandemic

• Strengthened candidate experience, ensuring that all examinees were assessed in a realistic but supportive simulated clinical environment

Impact

PRP’s collaboration with RCOG plays a critical role in the fair, rigorous, and empathetic assessment of the next generation of specialists in obstetrics and gynaecology. By providing highly professional, standardised role players, we contribute to upholding the College’s reputation for excellence in education, training, and women’s healthcare.