How to Implement Quantitative Skills Assessment (“Clinic Production”) as Part of the Assessment of Clinical Competence

By R. Todd Watkins Jr. & Linc J. Conn Jr.

How to Implement Quantitative Skills Assessment (“Clinic Production”) as Part of the Assessment of Clinical Competence - R. Todd Watkins Jr. & Linc J. Conn Jr.
  • Release Date: 2016-09-02
  • Genre: Education

Description

Every health science program requires that graduates are competent to perform clinical tasks independently with live patients. Simulation is very important to developing skills, but live-patient experiences are required. There are two ways to assess student interactions with live patients. First, is Quantitative Skills Assessment, which counts the number of live- patient clinical experiences encountered by each student. This is the focus of this manual. The second is Qualitative Skills Assessment, which grades the quality of skills performed on a sub-set of clinical experiences based on a rubric. Combined, the two types of assessment with simulation experiences can be used to determine overall clinical performance in terms of “competence.” 
The main difference between Quantitative Skills Assessment and Qualitative Skills Assessment is the standard for success. For Quantitative, basic clinical acceptability is the only standard for counting a procedure as complete. This is a binary choice where students get credit for each procedure that is performed to a basic standard. For Qualitative, each step of the procedure is graded individually for various levels of quality. 
The difficult tasks involved with developing Quantitative Skills Assessment are (1) normalizing each clinical procedure relative to a time or financial model, (2) assigning each procedure to disciplines or topics so that the procedures can be mapped to program competencies, (3) setting clinical thresholds (minimums) that must be met to indicate discipline competence, and (4) balancing patient assignment to meet thresholds. Each component of this implementation are detailed in the chapters of this manual. 
This document is intended to provide a step-by-step “how-to” manual for designing, implementing and evaluating Quantitative Skills Assessment of clinical procedures. The model was developed at East Carolina University School of Dental Medicine with much help from the Medical University of South Carolina School of Dentistry.