Organising spine chilling examination: virtual OSCEs: can they assess advanced healthcare practitioners

Introduction
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, academia, and health and social care curricula were dramatically impacted by digital strategies instantaneously. Nonetheless, this has been encouraged by clinicians, academics, and students to commit to digital and learning strategies to create an effective and efficient future workforce. Within academia, the curriculum was revised within a short time frame from blended learning to an online fusion of asynchronous and synchronous teaching, learning, and assessment strategies.

Aims and Objectives
The module is a highly comprehensive theoretical focus with innovative, sophisticated teaching and learning activities with Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCE) evaluating the participant’s metacognitive, affective, and psychomotor skills over 30-weeks within a multi-professional context.

Details of project
Using a quality improvement methodology underpinned the hybrid teaching and learning including the live virtual summative assessments. Promoting a positive learning culture allows honesty and openness while collaborating with students to develop independent skills, encourage active learning, within creating innovative, stimulating, supportive, and reflective environments. While legal and regulatory requirements were upheld, risk assessments and contingency plans were conducted and disseminated to all stakeholders to minimise various natural and artificial influencing factors that may have affected the assessments.

Results/Outcomes
This successful and innovative use of technology improved results, cost-effective, sustainable and allows the academic team to reflect on their enhanced knowledge and understanding of the interdisciplinary styles, the student experience and appreciate epistemological and discipline differences of the teaching, learning, and assessment strategies.

Conclusions/Impact
This positively influenced the students to be reflective, implement critical thinking processes, and engage with active learning from multiple perspectives, for example; during the pandemic, since the steep rise in telephone and video clinical, the virtual OSCE has equipped the future healthcare professional with the new, relevant and comprehensive skills within a safe environment that are transferrable outside the institution.