TY - JOUR T1 - Assessing patient safety competencies using Objective Structured Clinical Exams: a new twist on an old tool JF - BMJ Quality & Safety JO - BMJ Qual Saf SP - 179 LP - 181 DO - 10.1136/bmjqs-2015-003928 VL - 24 IS - 3 AU - Lynfa Stroud AU - Arpana R Vidyarthi Y1 - 2015/03/01 UR - http://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/24/3/179.abstract N2 - Despite the widespread attention to patient safety over the past 15 years, the subject continues to receive relatively little attention in undergraduate training for health professionals (eg, in medical and nursing schools). Recent advances such as the WHO curriculum guide1 and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute competency framework1 ,2 help to guide our teaching and learning. Furthermore, some schools have implemented patient safety curricula.3 ,4 However, evaluating the degree to which students attain these competencies remains in its infancy (‘On a scale of 1–5, rate how well you did X’), with all the limitations of self-assessment.5In an effort to progress the field further, Ginsburg et al6 describe the findings of a pilot that used the Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE) to assess patient safety competence. The OSCE provides a mechanism to move beyond assessing a learner's knowledge to its application by allowing the learner to show how they approach a scenario in a simulated setting. As such, it has largely become the cornerstone for the assessment of skills such as history taking, physical examination and even hand hygiene. Ginsburg et al used the OSCE to assess sociocultural patient safety competencies, which is a novel application of this traditional tool.The authors created scenarios true to inpatient ward settings for the simulation, which they used to provide and report summative learner assessments. Although they note, and we agree, that a high stakes summative assessment in patient safety competencies may drive what is taught and learned, evidence suggests that students … ER -