Our Past

Patty Edwards pioneered our work in the early 1970s, after undergoing a clumsy pelvic exam by a Stanford medical student. He looked for her ovaries in the wrong place - too high up on the belly - and put his hand on her pubic bone as he was searching for them. Explaining that he would not find what he was looking for, she guided his hand to the right spot. Her frank advice both startled and inspired her doctor at Stanford Medical Center, who supervised the exam. He asked Edwards to help develop a pelvic training program to give students experience before they examined real patients.

Edwards, a secretary, recruited a small group of her friends and relatives. "We joked about it: Instead of leaving our bodies to science when we died, we were giving our bodies while we were still here," she said. The program was set up as the women's movement raised awareness about reproductive health and female sexuality; its approach stood in contrast to that of medical institutions who would allow students to practice on anesthetized patients, sometimes without their explicit consent.

Edwards handed the program over to Norma Wilcox in 1981. Wilcox, a nurse, hired male educators to teach rectal exams and expanded the program to UCSF and Touro University. She was also instrumental in removing physicians, who once observed the exams, from the training sessions. Students interacted with them more than the Teaching Associates, and "they weren't learning communication skills,” Edwards explained. "Patients are the best educators. They know exactly how it should feel," adds Dr. Neil Gesundheit, Dean for Medical Education at Stanford.

In 2005, under the helm of its third leader, Kat Wentworth — a GTA since 1999, and with the guidance of Transgender Law Center co-founder Dylan Vade, the program developed what may have been the first OSCE case nationally to center a transgender patient, piloting it at Stanford. She further developed an Introduction to Sexual Medicine lecture and Sexual History Interviewing skills lab, incorporated the business, standardized the curriculum, and renamed it Project Prepare.

Adapted from: Hua, Vanessa. “'Patients Train Doctors to Perform Sexual Health Exams.” SFGATE, 7 Dec. 2003.

Our Present

We are currently a diverse team of 30 educators passionate about sexual and reproductive health, patient-centered care, and provider competency. 

We are midwives, sexological bodyworkers, certified massage therapists, STI and substance use harm-reduction counselors, physician assistants, HIV test counselors, Ph.D. level sexologists, clinical herbalists, nurses, middle school teachers, sex education curriculum creators, artists, parents, academics, public health administrators, domestic violence and sexual assault crisis counselors, case managers, community and sex worker rights activists. We have all undergone didactic training and clinical simulation to learn the Project Prepare curriculum, in addition to the expertise we bring from our respective fields.

We aim to incorporate trauma-informed approaches. We teach with our bodies and point out observable findings in real time. We represent a breadth of patient perspectives and range in age, sexual orientation, gender identity, body size, race and ethnicity, and ability. We travel throughout the United States, and support our students patiently as they wade through their anxieties and learn from their mistakes.

We hope you’ll work with us! Let's talk ▸