Enhancing Clinical Competence: Transitioning from Long Case Examinations to OSCEs in Medical Education

Abstract

The traditional long case clinical examination has been a cornerstone of medical education, assessing a student’s ability to apply clinical knowledge, skills, and reasoning in a real-world context. In this assessment, students clerk a patient, take a history, perform a physical examination, and present their findings and management plans to an examiner. While valued for its depth and ability to reproduce authentic clinical scenarios, this assessment method has several shortcomings that impact on its validity and reliability. These challenges are compounded by growing student numbers and the need for standardized assessments which make it undesirable especially for high stakes summative assessments.