Evaluation of student’s competencies on Social Medicine internship with the Objective Structured Clinical Examination method

Abstract

The aim of the current study is to evaluate OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) stations elaborated to asses competencies of external students on the 5th year of Social Medicine internship at the Faculty of Medicine of Monastir, in Tunisia, carried out over a year. The total number of OSCE stations was 32 with an average of 5.3 ± 2.3 stations per session, each station lasting five minutes. More than half of OSCE stations were a clinical vignette type (68.7%), followed by photo-type stations in 8 cases (25%). The total number of tasks required was 76.The number of stations about a single task was 18.75%. Morethan two-thirds of tasks involved competencies of cognitive level type III (72.1%). The number of elements per correction grid varied between 4 and 10 with an average of 6.44 ± 1.8 elements. At the end of the different examination sessions, the success rate was low (15-19 / 30) for 61% of learners with a discrimination index -0.41 and a difficulty index of tests 66%. These results attest the feasibility of OSCE stations for evaluation of skills in medical specialty. However, a regular and more thorough evaluation of this method is necessary in order to promote skills of future general practitioner