Fully online OSCEs: A large cohort case study

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) are extensively used for clinical assessment in the health professions. However, current social distancing requirements (including on-campus bans) at many universities have made the co-location of participants for large cohort OSCEs impossible. While there is a developing literature on remote OSCEs, particularly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is dominated by approaches dealing with small participant numbers. This paper describes our recent large scale (n = 361 candidates) implementation of a remotely delivered 2 station OSCE. The planning for this OSCE was extensive and involved comprehensive candidate, examiner and simulated patient orientation and training. Our processes were explicitly designed to develop platform familiarity for all participants and included building on remote tutorial experiences and device testing. Our remote OSCE design and logistics made use of using existing enterprise solutions including videoconferencing, survey and collaboration platforms and allowed extra time between candidates in case of technical issues. We describe our process in detail including examiner, simulated patient, and candidate perspectives to provide precise detail, hopefully assisting other institutions to understand and adopt our approach. Although logistically complex, we have demonstrated that it is possible to deliver a remote OSCE assessment involving a large student cohort with a limited number of stations using commonly available enterprise solutions. We recognise it would be ideal to sample more broadly across stations and examiners, yet given the constraints of our current COVID-19 impacted environment, we believe this to be an appropriate compromise for a non-graduating cohort at this time.