Evaluation of clinical skills with an objective structured clinical examination

Purpose: Health professionals are expected to exhibit strong communication and clinical skills. The curriculum at pharmacy schools should prepare students not only to successfully pass licensure examinations, but also to provide excellent clinical services to patients. Unfortunately, standardized testing is a mediocre way to evaluate clinical and communication skills.  Current literature supports the use of objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) as an effective tool to evaluate these skills. We used an OSCE to evaluate how effectively second-, third-, and fourth-year pharmacy students’ and practicing pharmacists’ communicate and apply knowledge to simulations of commonly encountered patient scenarios.

Methods: Second-, third-, and fourth- year pharmacy students enrolled at the University of the Incarnate Word, Feik School of Pharmacy completed an OSCE as part of their required courses.  Licensed pharmacists were recruited to complete the OSCE and serve as controls.  Trained standardized patients graded the interaction based on a rubric that consisted of clinical skill and communication checklists. 

Results: A total of 275 pharmacy students and 6 licensed pharmacists completed the OSCE and consented to participate in the study.  Overall, the licensed pharmacists performed better than the pharmacy students.  The fourth-year students performed better than the second-year (p=0.01) and third-year pharmacy students (p=<0.0001).  The pharmacists performed better than the second-year (p=0.02) and third-year (p=0.002) pharmacy students; however, there was not a statistically significant difference in performance between the fourth-year pharmacy students and pharmacists (p=0.07). 

Conclusion: The results of this study provide a better understanding of the clinical and communication skills of practicing pharmacists and pharmacy students at different stages of the curriculum.