Understanding professional development: Case studies of remedial support.

This study reports on work undertaken by the Interactive Studies Unit (ISU), University of Birmingham. A total of 727 doctors were referred to the ISU for one-to-one remedial support in a variety of non-clinical areas between 2010 and 2018. The close-in scrutiny which one-to-one support offers provides an opportunity to study and reflect on such issues as values and professionalism, which are notoriously difficult to define or reach objective judgments about.

Using standardized patients to assess communication skills in medical and nursing students.

Background: A number of recent developments in medical and nursing education have highlighted the importance of communication and consultation skills (CCS). Although such skills are taught in all medical and nursing undergraduate curriculums, there is no comprehensive screening or assessment programme of CCS using professionally trained Standardized Patients Educators (SPE's) in Ireland. This study was designed to test the content, process and acceptability of a screening programme in CCS with Irish medical and nursing students using trained SPE's and a previously validated global rating scale for CCS.

Simulated patients in the community pharmacy setting. Using simulated patients to measure practice in the community pharmacy setting.

Background: Performance measurement and quality of care in community pharmacy settings is problematic because of the lack of formal patient registration and the resultant risk of selection bias. Although simulated patients have been used for teaching and education purposes, particularly in medical settings, their use as a research tool requires exploration in other health settings. The purpose of this paper is to describe how we used simulated patients to measure professional performance of community pharmacy staff.

Gender as a variable in the assessment of final year degree-level communication skills.

Aim: To investigate possible bias due to gender combination of students, role players and examiners in a high-stakes assessment.

Setting: Valid oral interactive contextualized examinations (VOICEs) is a long-station OSCE-style exam in general practice (GP). At the time of writing it consisted of 65% of the student's final GP mark.

Hitting the mark: negotiated marking and performance factors in the communication skills element of the VOICE examination.

Introduction: Communication skills assessment is complex. Standardised patient use is widespread, but anxiety exists around the use of role players as assessors of competence in high stakes examinations. This study measures the level of agreement between scoring examiners and role players, and considers their influence on each other.