Initial experience of an objective structured clinical examination in evaluating urology residents.

Abstract

Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is now generally considered as the new gold standard for evaluating clinical competence. The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of OSCE in evaluating urology residents. 20 urology residents rotated through a circuit of five standardized patient-based OSCE stations of 10 min duration. The selection of problems was based on educational objectives of urology residency programs. Written questionnaires based on Likert-type scales were used to measure OSCE feasibility. The mean score was arbitrarily used as a passing score. Student t test was only used to compare the performance between junior and senior residents. Senior residents performed globally better, but without significant differences (51.3+/-7.8 vs. 45.03+/-5.1, p>0.05). Senior resident scores regarding outpatient problems were significantly higher (p = 0.04), more senior residents reached the passing score (75 vs. 16% junior residents). All the participants agreed that the clinical situations were realistic and that the simulated patients were believable. Most participants agreed that the sampling of cases were representative of urology practice. This is the first reported OSCE applied to urology residency. The results of this pilot study support the feasibility of an OSCE in assessing the performance of urology residents. Our data raises questions regarding the training of outpatient consultation skills to residents. This experiment warrants further series to explore the study's psychometrics features.