Abstract:

Introduction:
Over the years, there have been controversies pertaining to undergraduate medical students over the various styles and methods of Orthopedic clinical examinations as taught by the various clinical tutors and texts. This has affected their performance during clinical assessment, which was conducted in the form of Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Standardization of clinical examination techniques in Orthopedics, which primarily involves either fixing or following similar sequence and style through video demonstration, was believed to overcome this problem faced by students, alongside considerably reducing inconsistency in the assessment. Given that the examiner and the simulated patients used in the OSCE have been trained in a standardized manner, the recall capability of the individual students would be the sole variable in student assessment. The authors analyzed the students’ perception on the newly developed standardized videos as well as to compare performance between those who attended the video workshop and those who did not.

Methodology:
A cross sectional prospective cohort study of third year undergraduate medical students was conducted. Results were compared between students who attended the pre-OSCE workshop held 3 days prior to the OSCE assessment showing the standardized clinical examination techniques video and those who did not. Feedback based on the Likert scale was obtained from the post-workshop student and their performance at the end of OSCE was analyzed.

Results:
A total of 128 out of 260 medical students attended the workshop. Of these, 94.5% felt that the video series had successfully standardized the clinical examination techniques and 85.5% felt that they helped increase the understanding of common Orthopedic conditions. It was also found that 95.5% acknowledged the videos for their clarity in the explanation of the techniques and for its ‘to- the –point’ aspects. Most (90.9%) considered the videos to be relevant to the curriculum requirements and helped a majority (84.5%) to conceptualize and understand common Orthopedic clinical conditions. Students who attended the video workshop scored higher on average (74.01%) compared to those who did not attend (61.88%). In addition, students who attended the video workshop were more likely (37.2%) to receive positive qualitative remarks from the examiners than those who did not attend (9.1%).

Conclusions:
The use of standardized videos of clinical examination in Orthopedic gained positive perception from undergraduate medical students and improved their performance in OSCE assessment, hence it is suggested an effective tool for pre-assessment revision.

Keywords:

Clinical examination techniques, evaluation, Orthopedics, standardization, videos, perception, medical student.