This article explains the process of setting up instruction for your students with Exam Essentials.

You’ve decided that you’d like to have Exam Essentials teach your students how to perform specific medical exams with a focus on patient experience and trauma-informed methods. (Thanks! We’re grateful!)

1. What do you want us to teach?

Your first step is to decide what specific services you’d like us to do for you and your students. You can pick as many services as you want. Find those options here.

If none of our options meet your needs, let us know! We’re happy to work with you to find a solution.

If you want us to teach specific exams (most programs do), decide what exams you’d like to have us teach. The exams we currently teach are:

• • • Penile and testicular
    • Digital rectal
    • Breast
    • Pelvic including:
      • External
      • Speculum
      • Bi manual

 While we normally teach the penile, testicular, and DRE together, and also the breast and pelvic exams together, we can tailor our teaching to your needs. Read more about what techniques we include in each exam here. We can also change the ways that we teach your students if you want a different palpation method taught, or you want to include or exclude certain checks; for example, checking the lesser vestibular/skene’s glands, checking for rectocele or cystocele, using the “lawnmower*” palpation method for breast exams, etc.

2. Date & Time

Contact Kate to set up a date or dates for our instruction and a specific time. Depending on how many students you have, it may make sense to stretch our instruction over a few visits.

How many students can we teach?

Different instructors’ bodies can handle different amounts of exam practice, but in general, we like to keep vaginal exams to 7 or fewer per day and DRE and inguinal canal insertions to 12 or fewer per day.

How much time we need to instruct your students depends on the following factors:

• • • How you want us to instruct (lecture, small group instruction…)
    • How many students
    • How many instructors are available
    • Ease of communication with your students for whom English is a secondary language

As a general rule for Small Group Instruction, we teach approximately five students in 3 hours when teaching the breast and pelvic exams and ten students in 3 hours for penile, testicular, and digital rectal exams. We have experience making our instruction faster if you need it and including more information, instruction, and discussion if we have more time.

It is ideal to give us as much lead time as possible when scheduling our visit to you. Many instructors work at various schools as well as have more conventional careers. We always try to schedule instructors close to your location first, but we do have instructors in multiple states who will travel for a fee.

3. Contract

Kate sends you a contract to outline our agreement and specify the fees, timing, number of students, teaching tools you will provide (like gloves), and service/s we will provide.

There are times when the contract needs to change. For instance, if you need to change our instruction date or have a change in student numbers. Changes are easy to make, and Kate will send a new contract to specify and record the changes.

4. Take care of taxes…

If your institution needs it, send us a W9 form to fill out for tax time. If your program is a New Mexico program, we’ll need you to fill out an NTTC form so we don’t need to charge you sales tax.

5. We Instruct Your Students

After the paperwork is taken care of, we’re ready to come and instruct your students. This is detailed here in this post. We will arrive half an hour before our scheduled instruction start time to set up. We’ll teach for the time you’ve allotted. We’ll clean up our space before we leave.

There will always be one of us who manages the job onsite. If this is your first experience with Exam Essentials, that person will probably be Kate. Whoever it is, we’ll make sure to check in with you before we take off.

6. Invoice & Follow-up

Kate will send you an invoice as specified in the contract. Your institution has 30 days to pay it.

If this is your first experience with us, or it’s been a while since your last experience, we’ll send you a follow-up survey to see what went well and what we can do better next time. And we’re always glad to receive feedback with or without the survey!

* Really wish there was a better term for this method