Abstract
This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a challenge for all medical educators. There is a clear need to train the next generation of doctors whilst ensuring that patient safety is preserved. The OSCE has long been used as the gold standard for assessing clinical competency in undergraduates ( Khan et al., 2013a). However, social distancing rules have meant that we have had to reconsider our traditional assessment methods. We held a remote eight-station summative OSCE (rOSCE) for three final year resit students using Microsoft Teams. Apart from clinical examinations and practical procedures which are assessed elsewhere in our programme, the content was similar to our standard OSCE. Staff and student training ensured familiarity with the assessment modality. The rOSCE was found to be a feasible tool with high face validity. The rOSCE is a remote assessment tool that can offer an alternative to the traditional face to face OSCEs for use in high stakes examinations. Although further research is needed, we believe that the rOSCE is scalable to larger cohorts of students and is adaptable to the needs of most undergraduate clinical competency assessments.
Highlights
The 2020 global pandemic has forced medical educators to reflect on the viability of face to face, experiential medical education (Sabzwari, 2013)
Further research is needed, we believe that the remote OSCE (rOSCE) is scalable to larger cohorts of students and is adaptable to the needs of most undergraduate clinical competency assessments
We developed a new style of remote OSCE using Microsoft Teams
Summary
The 2020 global pandemic has forced medical educators to reflect on the viability of face to face, experiential medical education (Sabzwari, 2013). Unlike traditional OSCEs that require students to rotate around a circuit of stations each testing different clinical competencies, the students remained in the same Teams channel throughout their entire exam. The assessors shared a PowerPoint presentation with the students, consisting of a holding slide (Figure 2), student instructions and any information for the station This process removed the need for sharing of confidential material or paperwork outside the examination. The simulated patients joined the channel at the start of the station, with their camera off and microphones muted until invited in This process was repeated until the students had completed all the stations (Figure 3). These included an emergency contact number for the Chief Invigilator, having ‘buddy’ assessors in case of assessor illness, technology or network failure
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