Subjective assessment underestimates surgical risk: On the potential benefits of cardiopulmonary exercise testing for open thoracoabdominal repair.

Background: Initial clinical evaluation (ICE) is traditionally considered a useful screening tool to identify frail patients during the preoperative assessment. However, emerging evidence supports the more objective assessment of cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) via cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) to improve surgical risk stratification. Herein, we compared both subjective and objective assessment approaches to highlight the interpretive idiosyncrasies.

A pilot study of the mental workload of objective structured clinical examination examiners.

Context: Mental workload is a concept used in many industries to investigate operator performance, but it has only recently been used in the educational setting. It has been suggested that excessive mental workload in assessors may impair the validity of objective structured clinical examination (OSCE)-type assessments.

Objectives: This study aimed to establish the feasibility of measuring the mental workload of examiners during an OSCE assessment and to establish methodologies and baseline values to guide future study design.