Wearing scrubs and closed-toe shoes, two students awaited their performance, assuming character in the middle of the room. One pretended to be an intimidating boss and the other paced around the room as a worried office assistant as other students giggled from the sidelines.
After a day of seeing patients, the nine students sat back in their chairs and watched as their peers participated in short games during the weekly improvisation class.
“We basically play games – it’s just fun,” said Kavita Sainanee, a fourth-year, confirmed with writer dental student. “It’s kind of nice to have a couple of hours a week to forget about everything else and just have fun with our classmates.”
Craig Woods, an adjunct professor at the UCLA School of Dentistry, created the six-week course, called Medical Improv, in October. His goal is to use improvisation techniques to improve third- and fourth-year dental students’ skills in the workplace.
“I’m teaching these students how to do comedy improvisation and pointing out how those skills translate to a doctor-patient relationship,” Woods said.
Woods said many of the skills in improvisation, such as multitasking, listening to scene partners, reading emotional affect and being aware of status roles in the workplace, can also apply when working as a dentist.
In the UCLA School of Dentistry class, dental students play a variety of games and aim to develop skills that can help when handling stressful situations with patients.
In their third year of dental school, students start seeing a full schedule of patients, which Woods said he thinks can be intimidating. His goal in the class is to make the students more comfortable when they’re working with patients.
“What happens a lot in the dental school is the patient will … try to push (the dental student) around,” Woods said. “So it’s very important to make the students aware and have a gut feel for when that’s happening.”
Of the nine students in the course, some said they have experience with acting, others enjoyed comedy and others simply wanted to improve their communication skills.
Third-year dental student Samiksha Jaitwani said she took the class to help improve her communication skills when interacting with patients. As an international student, she said she initially found it difficult to describe treatment plans to patients as convincingly as some of her peers because of cultural differences between India, her home country, and the United States.
“(This class) made me more confident – I can already see that,” Jaitwani said. “I’ve had some incidents with patients in the clinic. I understood what frequency (the patients) were on and I got on the same level.”
She said she wants to continue taking improvisation courses after this one to further develop the skills she learned in this class.
Fourth-year dental student Sean Moghadam said he first enrolled in this course because he thought it was an interesting marriage of comedy and dentistry.
He said he thinks the course helps improve communication skills that are necessary when interacting with upset patients. When speaking to one of his patients who couldn’t afford a necessary healthcare treatment recently, he used the skills learned in class and commiserated with her over the difficulties of working with insurance companies.
“I thought, ‘she just probably wants someone to agree with her and understand her frustration,'” Moghadam said.
Four years ago, Woods took a local adult comedy class, loving it so much that he pursued more formal training at ImprovOlympic West, or iO West, a theater in Hollywood. He eventually amassed more than 150 hours of training and now performs once a month with a comedy improvisation troupe.
Woods said he was inspired to teach an improvisation course at the dental school after he heard about a similar course at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He uses exercises and scenarios he learned from the course and from his previous acting experiences to teach the class.
“It’s extremely fun. You’re around funny people,” Woods said. “And in order to do it you have to concentrate to the degree that there’s nothing else you can think about. It’s almost like meditating.”
During the improvisation class, students laid back in their chairs, enjoying the scenes and applauding each others’ performances. The exercise concluded with laughter as the student playing the angry boss fired her office assistant.