Associations between communication OSCE performance and admission interviews in medical education

Objective
To investigate associations between medical students’ communication and other clinical skills assessed in OSCEs and MMIs performance upon admission by developing an assessment strategy based on an internationally acknowledged curriculum framework.
Methods
Between July 2019 and March 2020, 365 medical students in the 4th and 5th semester took two OSCEs containing 10 5-minute stations examining communication and other clinical skills. We used a European conceptual framework to determine the content validity of the communication score and calculated scores of communication and other clinical skills. We assessed students’ OSCE performance and estimated multiple regressions to predict its association with MMIs.
Results
The multiple linear regressions showed that students’ MMI performance upon admission is significantly associated with the communication score (b = 0.32, p =.006) but not the clinical score (b = 0.19, p =.121), when controlling for gender and cognitive criteria.
Conclusions
Our assessment strategy designed to distinguish between different areas of competence provides a more thorough description of the positive relationship between OSCE performance and MMIs.
Practice implications
We developed a communication skills assessment strategy that can be easily applied by medical schools that use OSCEs as a training or assessment method.
Keywords
objective structured clinical examination (OSCE)
communication skills
clinical skills
medical education
selection criteria
multiple mini-interview (MMI)