Developing a clinical teaching quality questionnaire for use in a university osteopathic pre-registration teaching...

Area of Science:

• Health Professions Education
• Osteopathic Medicine
• Clinical Skills Assessment

Background:

• Clinical education is vital for health professional training.
• Existing clinical educator quality questionnaires are not suitable for student-led clinic environments.
• A need exists for a validated tool to assess clinical educators in osteopathy student-led settings.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a questionnaire assessing the quality of clinical educators within an osteopathy program at Victoria University.
• To address the gap in assessment tools for student-led clinical education environments.

Main Methods:

• Systematic literature search to identify relevant assessment items.
• Expert review (students, educators, academics) of 83 extracted items.
• Pilot testing of a 56-item questionnaire with osteopathy students.
• Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to determine questionnaire structure.

Main Results:

• EFA indicated that a five-factor solution provided the most stable structure.
• Internal consistency for the five-factor solution exceeded 0.70.
• The initial four-factor solution collapsed into three factors, highlighting the superiority of the five-factor model.

Conclusions:

• The developed questionnaire comprises five factors: Learning Environment, Reflective Practice, Feedback, Patient Management, and Modelling.
• The five-factor structure demonstrates promising reliability and validity for assessing clinical educators in osteopathy student-led clinics.
• Further research is recommended to confirm construct validity and reliability.