Utilization of Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) in Ensuring Clinical Competence of Nursing Students: A Case of FCMS

摘要

Fakeeh College for Medical Sciences nursing department is currently imposing the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) as an academic system for its nursing students. This is to test the clinical skills and abilities in ensuring the competency and performance of future health providers. This is a type of clinical examination that uses hands on method of the real world situation of learning as an exposure ai,ded by various medical cases. Among the tested sub-ject, critical care emerged as the highest weighted average obtained by the stu-dents (n = 22; x = 94.14) with an equivalent description of “excellent” while in contrast to fundamentals of nursing 2 which garnered (n = 66; x = 79.70) with an equivalent description of “Good” as the lowest among the subjects. To rein-force the findings, this study made used of Focus Group Discussion (FGD) and Codification Technique to protect the identity of the respondents and its confi-dentiality as part of research ethics. The data revealed that a general observa-tion from the narratives provided the conduct of OSCE is fair, accurate, and necessary that fits the nursing program of the institution except on the issue of time frame that can be resolved. The clinical issues such as confidentiality, examination and impact are so far in place and a revisit is necessary for im-provement. Challenges involving conduct of the examination and quality of the examination must be given due consideration as pointed according to the need of time. This study concludes that OSCE is generally acceptable as an examination system in the nursing program of the institution.