Can teaching hospitals use serial formative OSCEs to improve student performance?

Heng-Hui Lien,Sang-Feng Hsu,Jiann-Horng Yeh,Shu-Chen Chen

doi:10.1186/s13104-016-2266-1

Heng-Hui Lien, Sang-Feng Hsu + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-016-2266-1

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Abstract

BackgroundWe report on interns’ clinical competence and experiences of an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) training program over 3 years. We aimed to determine whether repeated formative OSCEs allow teaching hospitals to improve the effectiveness of clinical training and help interns to achieve high scores in the national summative OSCE.MethodsThis study included 207 participants, among whom 82 were interns who had completed four mock OSCEs and a national OSCE at the clinical center of Cathay General Hospital (CGH). The other 125 participants were final-year medical students from Fu-Jen University who had completed the national OSCE between 2013 and 2015 at one of four teaching hospitals (including CGH). CGH interns were categorized into three groups according to the medical school attended and Fu-Jen University students were grouped according to their training hospitals. CGH held four mock OSCEs (30 stations), whereas each of the four training hospitals for Fu-Jen students each held one or two OSCEs (6–12 stations) annually. Differences in the mean OSCE scores among groups were analyzed. The medical school attended, pre-internship OSCE experience and the frequency of mock OSCEs held by training hospitals were independent factors in this study.ResultsThe cumulative mean scores for five OSCEs among three groups of students trained at CGH tended to increase from the first OSCE (OSCE1) to the fifth (OSCE5). The mean score of the students who attended Fu-Jen Medical School was higher than that of students who graduated from foreign medical schools in all five OSCEs; however, the differences were significant only for OSCE2 (P = 0.022) and OSCE3 (P = 0.027). The mean national OSCE scores of FJU students showed no statistically significant differences among the four training hospitals for 2013; however, students training at CGH had significantly higher mean scores in the 2014 (P = 0.001) and 2015 (P = 0.005) OSCEs compared with students training at the other three hospitals.ConclusionsSerial administration of formative OSCEs by teaching hospitals enhances the performance of students on the sequential summative OSCE. Such programs provide multiple opportunities for students to practice their clinical skills, and for faculty to develop their teaching, assessment and consensus building skills.

Highlights

We report on interns’ clinical competence and experiences of an objective structured clinical examina‐ tion (OSCE) training program over 3 years
Student performance For the 82 students trained at Cathay General Hospital (CGH) from 2013 to 2015, the cumulative mean scores for OSCE1 through OSCE5 showed positive curve (Fig. 1)
analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed significant differences for OSCE2 and OSCE3; no significant differences were found for OSCE1, OSCE4, and OSCE5 (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

We report on interns’ clinical competence and experiences of an objective structured clinical examina‐ tion (OSCE) training program over 3 years. We aimed to determine whether repeated formative OSCEs allow teaching hospitals to improve the effectiveness of clinical training and help interns to achieve high scores in the national sum‐ mative OSCE. Administration of formative and summative objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) in teaching programs has been shown to improve final-year medical. OSCEs are well-established as effective assessment tools for clinical competence. As such, they have become an important part of the medical licensing process in many countries [4, 5]. The Taiwanese national OSCE was held in over 20 certified examination units set in teaching hospitals or medical schools

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