Preparedness for clinical clerkship
Assessment of clinical skills may be viewed as subjective, therefore Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) have been introduced.9,12 The OSCE is a modern tool to assess competences of students, to evaluate the curriculum and to evaluate an educational intervention. It consists of series of stations with different tasks, between which students rotate. Students have limited amount of time to complete task and are assessed by OSCE assessors, who use global rating scales or checklists to evaluate students.15 As medical students progress towards clinical clerkships in their studies and transition from preclinical to clinical medical training, skills become even more important. Through this understanding many medical schools have identified the need to improve preparedness and students’ perceptions of readiness for clerkships.16 Transition can be a source of high levels of stress and anxiety, especially when students are inadequately prepared. Inadequate preparedness may impede the participation in the clinical environment and therefore hinder achieving the learning goals of a clerkship. Furthermore, it may interfere with patient safety.13,17 Activities that enable students to develop and remediate clinical skills could lower the level of stress in students during the transition and minimize negative impacts on students’ learning or well-being.13,14
There is limited information on medical students’ pre-clerkship preparedness.13 It has not been measured before in the students at our faculty.
The aim of our study was to evaluate in a low-stakes formative assessment the clinical skills level improvement of finishing medical students prior to and after their 9-week Internal medicine clerkship.