OSCE to Assess Community Health Competencies

Project Description Narrative:

The goal of this project is to develop an Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE) to assess Family and Community Medicine clerkship students’ competency to provide community responsive care with a focus on the impact of cultural beliefs, values, and norms, socioeconomic status (SES) and health literacy on the patient encounter and health status. The OSCE is an innovative and effective method to examine behavioral skills of medical students and practitioners in a variety of medical encounter situations such as delivering bad news, telephone skills, and violence screening. The OSCE provides a standard situation using a standardized patient to whom all learners in a training condition are exposed, thus allowing for observation and scoring of the adequacy of the participants’ behavioral encounters in the structured situation.

The Family and Community Medicine clerkship curriculum instructs students to conceptualize health very broadly and teaches the effects of socioeconomic status on health, cultural competency, and the physician’s role as health educator. The researchers’ focus is to teach the students to be community-responsive physicians who understand, value, and use the community context to care for patients because individual risk factors are often insufficient explanations of disease and illness. The skills that students are taught can be effectively measured through assessment of a simulated patient encounter.