The rOSCE: A remote clinical examination during COVID lockdown and beyond.

ABSTRACT

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a challenge for all medical educators. There is a clear need to train the next generation of doctors whilst ensuring that patient safety is preserved. The OSCE has long been used as the gold standard for assessing clinical competency in undergraduates ( Khan et al., 2013a). However, social distancing rules have meant that we have had to reconsider our traditional assessment methods. We held a remote eight-station summative OSCE (rOSCE) for three final year resit students using Microsoft Teams. Apart from clinical examinations and practical procedures which are assessed elsewhere in our programme, the content was similar to our standard OSCE. Staff and student training ensured familiarity with the assessment modality. The rOSCE was found to be a feasible tool with high face validity. The rOSCE is a remote assessment tool that can offer an alternative to the traditional face to face OSCEs for use in high stakes examinations. Although further research is needed, we believe that the rOSCE is scalable to larger cohorts of students and is adaptable to the needs of most undergraduate clinical competency assessments.