First Experience with OSCE as an Exit Clinical Examination for General Surgery Residency Program at the Addis Ababa University, School of Medicine

Background: The evaluation of clinical skills of surgical residents has long been viewed by surgical educators as problematic and the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is said to address the deficiencies of the traditional clinical examinations. Here, we report findings from evaluation of our first experience with this examination at the Addis Ababa University, Department of Surgery.
Methods: This was a cross sectional survey among surgical students in University, School of Medicine, Department of Surgery, Addis Ababa University. The study population consisted of 10 final year residents in General surgery sitting for final exit exam in the year 2011 and 20 academic staff at the Department of surgery.
Results: The study showed that both students and instructors found OSCE to be useful and believed that OSCE evaluated very well the history taking and physical examination ability of residents. Students’ OSCE results showed that they had borderline consistency (Cronbach’s α =0.67) and correlation with viva (Pearson r = 0.65; p-value=0.04) and written test results (Pearson r = 0.58; P-value=0.08).
Conclusion: Overall, the findings indicate that OSCE can be implemented with some level of success provided the students and staffs are adequately oriented and convinced of the justifications for an objective assessment in clinical training. Further plans and activities need to address how OSCE can be made a more reliable measure of students’ performance.