ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1594705
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Importance of Faculty Development in Medical EducationView all 18 articles
The application of objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) for evaluating clinical internship in long-term clinical medical students in China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Teaching Office, Zhongnan Hospital, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China
- 2Department of Gastroenterology, Zhongnan Hospital, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
- 3Department of Cardiology, Zhongnan Hospital, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hebei Province, China
- 4Department of Clinical Laboratory, Zhongnan Hospital, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China
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Background: Clinical internship plays a vital role in enhancing medical students' theoretical knowledge, clinical operational abilities, and clinical thinking development. This study aims to establish an efficient evaluation system to assess interns' proficiency in clinical skills, and analyze the teaching effectiveness of clinical internships. Methods: This is a retrospective descriptive study. A total of 75 long-term clinical medical students, including 26 eight-year students and 49 "5+3" students, who had already completed a three-month clinical internship in internal medicine, participated in an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Four stations during the OSCE included history taking, abdominal physical examination, thoracentesis, and interpretation of auxiliary examination results. Both candidates and examiners voluntarily completed anonymous Likert scale questionnaire immediately after the OSCE. Results were analyzed using the Chi-square test and the t-test as appropriate.Results: In history taking station, new examiners awarded significantly higher scores compared to examiners with experience in conducting examinations (t=6.21, p<0.0001). "5+3" candidates scored significantly higher than eight-year clinical medicine doctoral program candidates in physical examination and thoracentesis station (t=5. 316, p<0.0001; and t=2.145, p=0.0353, respectively). According to the questionnaire survey, the majority of candidates and all examiners were quite satisfied with its design, organization, quality and effectiveness. More than half of the candidates and examiners believed that insufficient practice and inadequate preparation for revision were the factors most likely to affect performance. 75% of the examiners felt that candidates needed the most training in operative steps and content, but only 56% and 40% of the candidates agreed with this view. Furthermore, 56% of candidates and half of the examiners identified operational methods and humanistic care as areas that still required intensive improvement.This study is an effective attempt to construct an OSCE evaluation system for the skills of long-term clinical medical students in the internship stage. This system can objectively and comprehensively reflect the students' clinical skills, promote the realization of
Keywords: Medical Education, Internal Medicine, OSCE, Clinical internship, Clinical skills
Received: 16 Mar 2025; Accepted: 18 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yang, Liu, Dong, Ding, Lu, Yu and He. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Zhi-Bing Lu, Department of Cardiology, Zhongnan Hospital, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430071, Hebei Province, China
Mingxia Yu, Department of Clinical Laboratory, Zhongnan Hospital, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China
Xingxing He, Department of Gastroenterology, Zhongnan Hospital, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
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