 At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. The University of Pikeville is currently seeking applicants from all walks of life for paid positions in their standardized patient and human model programs. The programs each help medical students hone their skills by allowing them the chance to interact with and perform routine diagnostic exams on live patients in simulated real-world scenarios. Earlier, we spoke with Danny Driscoll and Lori Beth Day from the University of Pikeville to find out more about this unique opportunity. Our standardized patients are basically actors, actresses that portray different patients with different injuries or illnesses. And there are main means of helping our medical students practice their ability to interact in a clinical encounter with simulated patients that are also real-life human beings. Driscoll points out that while the standardized patient and human model roles are similar, there are some considerable differences between the two. The standardized patients, it's more of a non-invasive in a gown with shorts and that kind of thing underneath and just interacting like a regular doctor's visit. The human models are people that actually volunteer to have more invasive exams performed on them. We have male and female models, so the female model would have students doing the breast and pelvic exams on them and the male model would have students doing like the prostate exam on them. While the experience may sound uncomfortable to some, for those who are still interested, Day points out that compensation for participation in the program is very competitive. For the standardized patient, it is $20 an hour. For a human model, it is $40 an hour since that's a little more invasive. For the standardized patients, we run usually at least eight days per semester. For the human models, we do about the same, but it's all clustered into one for human models. So we'll do female exams in late July, early August, and those are about eight days within two weeks, and then we'll do the male exams in January. You get paid a good two hours just to come and eat, so we have free food and we also have snacks throughout the day if you're diabetic or if you're just like me and like to eat. And then you can go and hang out in the lounge and you pretty much do sessions that are about 15 minutes and then you get 15 minutes off for the student while they're writing their note and you can just hang out and it's a very easy day. I always looked at it as a day off, even though you're working, you're not really working, it's a whole lot better. We also spoke with Bob Sweeney, the longest tenured standardized patient currently working with the program, about his experiences after spending more than a decade in the role. Well it's been a real learning experience, it's been a lot of fun, and it's great to see and work with young people that are wanting to do something with their lives, wanting to do something more than just get by. And the students appreciate what you do, I believe, and that in itself is pretty rewarding. For more information on these programs, including how to apply, viewers are encouraged to contact the University of Pikeville directly. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joshua Slun.