A proposed feedback model for the objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) in health and medical education

The objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) is used extensively in health and medical education to assess clinical competence. While OSCEs are not primarily designed for individual feedback, they provide an opportunity to generate meaningful and constructive feedback that students can use to reflect on areas of weakness (and strength). The most timely and effective way to incorporate individual feedback following a summative OSCE continues to be explored. This paper describes a novel OSCE feedback model which uses readily available summative assessment data to calculate 10% index scores. This provides information about relative station difficulty and relative individual student performance. An individualised feedback report was provided to every student after the OSCEs. This enables identification of stronger and weaker performance areas and composite skills, which can be utilised by all students to direct future learning. Providing timely, individual actionable feedback to every student following a summative OSCE is possible without impacting the examination process or examiner burden. A study is planned to determine the utilisation of this feedback by students and it's impact as a qualitative self-assessment exercise.