Resource Center

The Objective Structured Clinical Evaluation (OSCE) has become the criterion standard for the assessment of clinical competence in undergraduate and postgraduate medical and other health professional programs. Its strengths emerge from a standardized process that uses a sampling strategy within which students encounter multiple standardized patients, perform multiple tasks, and are assessed by multiple evaluators (Harden & Glesson, 1979).

While initially developed for undergraduate education, the OSCE has been used more broadly in postgraduate medicine (see for example Wagner, Hoppe, & Lee, 2009) and has been used with uniprofessional teams of students (Singleton, Smith, Harris, Ross-Harper, & Hilton, 1999). To our knowledge, there is no literature describing the use of an OSCE as a learning tool with existing health care teams.

With the increased attention on the need for interprofessional collaboration to improve health care, we became interested in the possibilities of using an evaluation modeled on the OSCE to evaluate collaborative competencies in the clinical setting. Our aim was to develop a formative tool for primary health care providers that would provide assessment and feedback for interprofessional health care teams. We describe a process used to establish face and content validity of the McMaster-Ottawa Team Observed Structured Clinical Encounter (TOSCE).

Please note: The full text of this article is only available to those with subscription access to the Informa Healthcare database. Contact your institutional library or the publisher for details.