Team Objective Structured Bedside Assessment (TOSBA) in Paediatric Undergraduate Students

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Paediatric Clinical Skills Assessment

Background:

• Objective Structured Clinical Evaluation (OSCE) is a standard for assessing clinical skills.
• There is a need for reliable and valid bedside assessment tools for paediatric undergraduate students.
• Team Objective Structured Bedside Assessment (TOSBA) was developed to address this need.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a Team Objective Structured Bedside Assessment (TOSBA) tool.
• To assess the clinical skills of paediatric undergraduate students at the bedside.
• To evaluate the reliability and validity of the TOSBA tool.

Main Methods:

• A validation, cross-sectional study was conducted.
• 61 fourth-year students participated in the TOSBA process 4-5 times during a 4-week paediatric rotation.
• Psychometric analysis included internal consistency, item-total correlation, and correlation with end-of-rotation OSCE scores.

Main Results:

• The TOSBA tool showed good overall reliability (Cronbach's alpha >0.7) for all assessed clinical skills.
• Strong correlations (r² >0.4, p <0.001) were found for history taking and clinical reasoning.
• The tool demonstrated divergent validity, with minimal correlations between different constructs within the same method.

Conclusions:

• The developed TOSBA tool is a reliable and moderately valid instrument for the formative assessment of undergraduate paediatric students.
• TOSBA provides a valuable bedside assessment method to enhance clinical skills development in paediatrics.
• Further refinement may be needed for specific stations based on item-total correlation results.