Sharpening the eye of the OSCE with critical action analysis.

Purpose: When interpreting performance scores on an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE), are all checklist items created equal? Although assigning priority through checklist item weighting is often used to emphasize the clinical importance of selected checklist items, the authors propose the use of critical action analysis as an additional method for analyzing and discriminating clinical performance in clinical skill assessment exercises. A critical action is defined as an OSCE checklist item whose performance is critical to ensure an optimal patient outcome and avoid medical error. In this study, the authors analyzed a set of clerkship OSCE performance outcome data and compared the results of critical action analysis versus traditional checklist item performance scores.

Enhancing clinical skills education: University of Virginia School of Medicine's Clerkship Clinical Skills Workshop Program.

In 1993, the University of Virginia School of Medicine began a clinical skills workshop program in an effort to improve the preparation of all clerkship students to participate in clinical care. This program involved the teaching of selected basic clinical skills by interested faculty to small groups of third-year medical students. Over the past 14 years, the number of workshops has increased from 11 to 31, and they now involve clerkship faculty from family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics.