Students Evaluation of an Observed Structured Clinical Evaluation (OSCE) in Community Health Nursing Clinical Practice

Abstract

Innovation in community health nursing practices required skill full competent nurse in order to provide comprehensive care for promotion of health and prevention of illness in the public health sector. The speed innovation in nursing practice is not at a fast enough speed to accommodate the enormous global challenges facing nursing's future. Innovation in evaluation method will improve quality of nursing practices which will be help full to achieve professional competency. Objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) is a multi-system examination using real or simulated patients to evaluate clinical skills, attitudes and cognitive abilities. It demonstrated reliability and validity for assessing clinical performance. It is a powerful innovative tool in the evaluation of clinical competence in nursing and that it may also be an effective facilitator for learning to perform clinical skills in nursing to achieve professional competency. So this study was conducted to assess student's evaluation of an Observed Structured clinical evaluation (OSCE) examination in community health nursing practices in a selected college of nursing of Pune city. A descriptive exploratory design and Nonprobability convenience sampling technique was used. Sample size was 25. Students have evaluated structure, content, organization, quality, validity and reliability of an OSCE with the use of a modified Pierre et al. (2004) OSCE evaluation questionnaire tool. Findings shows that OSCE is a fair examination method (100%) and 80% of them felt that it provides a true measure of essential clinical skills without biasness which minimized their chances of failing. Most of them (80%) also agreed that the assessment process with checklist helped to identify weaknesses and gaps in their competencies. (60%) of them found that OSCE is fearless and not stress full. This study finding shows that student's acceptability of an OSCE as an effective tool to assess student's clinical competency level. Students evaluated that OSCE is fair and transparent, valid, fearless, stress less process to assess clinical competencies of nursing students through formative and summative evaluation in community health nursing practices. OSCE can be evaluated as a standardized method clinical skill evaluation which can be used in a combination with traditional (current) method. So that expected competency level of nursing student in community health nursing clinical practice will be achieved.