Abstract
The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) has been widely and increasingly used since its inception in 1975. It was specifically focused on assessing the clinical skills of medical students. Since then the OSCE has been adapted for use in other health professional curricula, particularly nursing. At undergraduate level, three factors that indicate that OSCE is best used for the assessment of psychomotor skills are, firstly, that undergraduate nurses operate towards the novice end of the novice-expert continuum. Secondly, nurses must be sufficiently competent to practise their profession safely prior to clinical placement and, finally, the difficulties of replicating a real-world clinical environment in an examination context need to be acknowledged. This article, therefore, provides an overview of the utilisation of OSCE as an assessment tool for undergraduate nursing students. Different approaches to OSCE, preparation and planning for OSCE, scoring rubric, quality assurance strategies, advantage and disadvantages of this assessment approach are discussed.
Highlights
The assessment of clinical competence is an essential requirement of health professional education, with standardised procedures ensuring objectivity and maximising the reliability of assessments
Preparation of the assessors and the assessment tools The assessors should be oriented with regard to the assessment process, the tools that will be used at particular stations, the duration at each station and the information that the assessor and student should look out for in the stations
Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) provides for a meaningful alternative strategy as it allows for individual assessments of a total group or class of students in a timely, controlled and safe manner
Summary
The assessment of clinical competence is an essential requirement of health professional education, with standardised procedures ensuring objectivity and maximising the reliability of assessments. The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is a popular tool for assessing clinical competence in nursing (Harden et al, 1975). It was first introduced in medical education in 1975 by Ronald Harden at the University of Dundee in Scotland. OSCE entails an assessment where learners demonstrate their competence under a variety of simulated conditions. OSCE integrates knowledge and skills, enabling components of clinical competence and performance to be identified and assessed under standardised conditions. This allows for a large number of students to be assessed simultaneously (Clarke, Rainey & Traynor, 2011). In the 1990s, its use across North America, Canada, Australia and other Western countries has increased (Rushforth, 2007)
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