Effectiveness of an occupational and environmental medicine curriculum as indicated by evaluation of medical student performance on an objective structured clinical examination.

Abstract

Medical students must learn to recognize occupational and environmental-related illness. An occupational and environmental medicine curriculum can achieve this goal. The curriculum must be evaluated to ensure that medical students are learning to recognize exposure-related health conditions and to evaluate if this ability correlates with medical interviewing skills. A case, formatted for an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), was developed to evaluate student performance on an exposure-related clinical problem. The OSCE results were analyzed to identify the areas that differentiated the students who recognized an exposure-related medical condition from those who did not. We conclude that an OSCE is an effective curriculum evaluation tool to assess whether a core occupational and environmental-related curriculum is contributing to student learning in exposure history-taking and associated clinical reasoning skills.