Dear Sir
Each year, the University of Washington administers a 9- or 10-station OSCE to approximately 220 second-year students and 220 senior students. Typically, about one-third of those stations are directly observed by experienced clinician observers, which requires hundreds of faculty and volunteer clinician hours. Given the high value of faculty and clinician time, and the less expensive option of using trained standardized patients as observers, we wondered if having clinician observers give real-time feedback to students during OSCEs was a worthwhile activity. We attempted to answer this question by surveying both our clinician observers and students after a recent OSCE.
Forty clinicians volunteered to observe the UW 2012 Senior OSCE. At the end of each testing day, we asked the observing clinicians to answer an anonymous survey including why they volunteered to observe the Senior OSCE. We also surveyed all 221 students immediately following the same Senior OSCE. The students were asked about the value of the feedback and whether we should continue to use clinicians as observers.
Response rates from the clinician observer and student surveys were 93% and 99%, respectively. 89% of students strongly agreed or agreed that the UW should continue to use clinicians as observers. 82% strongly agreed or agreed that the feedback they received at the end of each observed OSCE station was helpful.
Clinicians who volunteered to observe the OSCE also found value in the experience. The most frequent reason for participating, cited by 34%, fell under the theme of Professional Development and Learning. Observers valued learning something about the students, the process, or themselves as teachers. Observers also found the experience enjoyable, an opportunity to interact with medical students and an opportunity to “give back” to the learning community.
In a paper published on MedEdWorld Publish, “Adding value to OSCEs by providing real-time clinician feedback”, we concluded that students appreciate direct, real-time feedback, and clinicians volunteer because it is an enjoyable learning experience, and an opportunity to interact with students and teach the next generation of physicians.