Abstract
BackgroundClinical education forms a substantial component of health professional education. Increased cohorts in Australian osteopathic education have led to consideration of alternatives to traditional placements to ensure adequate clinical exposure and learning opportunities. Simulated learning offers a new avenue for sustainable clinical education. The aim of the study was to explore whether directed observation of simulated scenarios, as part replacement of clinical hours, could provide an equivalent learning experience as measured by performance in an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE).MethodsThe year 3 osteopathy cohort were invited to participate in replacement of 50% of their clinical placement hours with online facilitated, video-based simulation exercises (intervention). Competency was assessed by an OSCE at the end of the teaching period. Inferential statistics were used to explore any differences between the control and intervention groups as a post-test control design.ResultsThe funding model allowed ten learners to participate in the intervention, with sixty-six in the control group. Only one OSCE item was significantly different between groups, that being technique selection (p = 0.038, d = 0.72) in favour of the intervention group, although this may be a type 1 error. Grade point average was moderately positively correlated with the manual therapy technique station total score (r = 0.35, p < 0.01) and a trivial relationship with the treatment reasoning station total score (r = 0.17, p = 0.132).ConclusionsThe current study provides support for further investigation into part replacement of clinical placements with directed observation of simulated scenarios in osteopathy.
Highlights
Clinical placements constitute a key element of all health professional programs, including osteopathy
Comparison of performance on graded clinical competencies Correlations between the total score and global rating for both the Osteopathic Diagnosis & Clinical Reasoning station (r = 0.80) and High velocity low amplitude (HVLA) Technique station (r = 0.79) were acceptable and suggested that the total station score accounted for approximately 62% of the global rating
The only significant between-group difference was for Technique Selection in Station 3 (HVLA Technique) (p = 0.038, d = 0.72) with the experimental group having higher scores with a large effect size
Summary
Clinical placements constitute a key element of all health professional programs, including osteopathy. The osteopathy course at Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne, Australia includes a mixture of classroom-based teaching and clinical placements. The osteopathy clinical education setting facilitates students application of skills, knowledge and attributes developed in the classroom to a real world setting [1]. One of the benefits of simulation education is the ability to develop patient scenarios that align with learning outcomes and/or learning needs. Increased cohorts in Australian osteopathic education have led to consideration of alternatives to traditional placements to ensure adequate clinical exposure and learning opportunities. The aim of the study was to explore whether directed observation of simulated scenarios, as part replacement of clinical hours, could provide an equivalent learning experience as measured by performance in an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE)
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