ReviewReliability and validity of OSCE checklists used to assess the communication skills of undergraduate medical students: A systematic review☆
Section snippets
Background
Physicians’ communication skills (CS) have a considerable impact upon quality of health care, whereby good CS improve healthcare outcomes, such as physiologic status, pain control, and emotional health, and significantly increase patient understanding and patient satisfaction [1], [2].
Effective physician–patient communication is essential in ensuring that patients adequately understand their diagnoses, treatment options, medications, plans for referral and prognosis. Dissatisfaction with
Method
A preliminary narrative literature review, pertaining to clinical CS and OSCEs, was conducted by the Principle Investigator (PI), WS, in order to ensure that key points and conceptual frameworks were adequately covered in later search strategies. A list of keywords was developed from the results of this exercise, so that they could form the basis for a more extensive literature search detailed below.
A search was performed in order to identify studies which were published between January 1975
Search results
The initial literature search identified 1998 papers (Fig. 1). After removal of duplicates, 1358 papers remained. By review of the titles and abstracts, 613 were excluded on the basis of irrelevancy. A further 557 papers were excluded as they were not related to OSCEs in undergraduate medical schools. Manual review of the titles and abstracts of the remaining papers identified a further 20 duplicates and 13 non-English language papers, all of which were excluded. In cases where it was not
Discussion
The most striking finding of our study is a demonstrated absence of consensus in rubrics used to assess CS in undergraduate medical education worldwide. Furthermore, it is apparent that there is a clear absence of consensus between researchers in medical education in their interpretation of terminology and in their determination of performance standards in the assessment of CS in different settings. The OSCE is widely utilized to assess CS at undergraduate and postgraduate levels [55]. It is
Conflict of interest statement
All three authors declare no conflict of interest.
Notes on contributors
Winny Setyonugroho, is Lecturer in Health Informatics, Department Health Informatics, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences, Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, Indonesia and also a PhD student, domain Medical Informatics & Medical Education, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, College of Medicine, Nursing & Health Sciences National University of Ireland Galway (supervised by Dr Thomas JB Kropmans).
Kieran Kennedy is Lecturer in Clinical Methods and Clinical Practice, Department of
Acknowledgement
The lead author, Winny Setyonugroho, received a PhD scholarship from the Directorate General of Higher Education, Ministry of National Education and Culture of Indonesia.
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The content was presented at the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) 2013 conference in Prague, Czech Republic.