Dietetic students’ performance of activities in an objective structured clinical examination

Abstract

A dietetic OSCE was generally positively accepted by the students and offers a very effect form of assessment of key dietetic skills. Students performed better at activities requiring communication skills than those requiring greater discriminatory and interpretation and food knowledge skills. Students' food knowledge skills require reinforcing to ensure that they acquire the knowledge and skills that are unique to dietitians.

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics/The American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition Consensus Malnutrition Characteristics

“…The observer provides feedback to the student at the end of each station. The OSCE has been used to assess multiple dietetic student clinical skills including communication skills and interviewing patients, interpretation and food knowledge skills, performing a nutrition assessment, planning a nutrition intervention, and calculating and planning an enteral feeding regimen 30 – 32 . We developed malnutrition scenarios for use with the OSCE exercises and used our own nutrition department members (dietitians, dietetic technicians, managers, clerical support staff) as standardized patients and observers (dietitian only).…”

Pre‐registration dietetic students’ attitudes to learning communication skills

“…These results challenge HEIs and dietetic practice placement providers to establish effective assessment methods and tools that are fit for purpose and part of a coherent communication skills assessment strategy. In the HEI setting, the use of the objective structured clinical examination allows a standardised approach for assessing a number of skills, including communication (Lambert et al, 2010), and students have responded positively to this assessment method. Further research is required to establish whether this assessment method specifically promotes positive attitudes to learning communication skills among dietetics students.…”

Internationalism in dietetic education and practise

“…These papers serve to demonstrate some international commonalities that already exist in dietetic education and assessment of competency in dietetics. For example, Lambert et al. (2010) describes the use of an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) and how a cohort of students in the UK react to this type of competency based assessment.…”