HealthCAST

HealthCAST is a partnership between the School of Nursing & Dental Hygiene and the Department of Theatre & Dance at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.  I was hired in 2013 by the School of Nursing as a graduate assistant to help develop and pilot the program.  HealthCAST was an immediate success and expanded rapidly; we now participate in over a dozen different scenarios across the undergraduate and graduate nursing curricula. In 2021, the position was expanded and I am now the HealthCAST Program Manager.

Through HealthCAST, I recruit, cast, and coach theatre students to portray patients in largely improvised scenarios with the nursing students.  Emphasis is placed on psychosocial and emotional scenarios, such as end-of-life decision making for a child, oncology, post-traumatic stress disorder, child abuse, and post-partum depression (to name only a handful of scenarios in our repertoire).  Nursing and theatre students provide each other with constructive feedback following each simulation. Ultimately, I serve as an intermediary between two different disciplines, ensuring that the simulation experience is mutually beneficial for both the theatre and nursing students.