Eighty third-year UIC medical students took a practical test on Tuesday, 24 January 2012, in which they were faced with different clinical situations and had to put into practice the knowledge they had acquired in the subjects Physiopathogeny, Semiology and Emergency Room: History and Semiology. The students used this test to prepare for the OSCE, the official objective and structured clinical examination. The students will have to take the OSCE exam when they finish the medical programme.
The test was held in a simulation laboratory at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and involved moving through ten different treatment rooms, where each student had five minutes to solve different clinical situations, all of which are normal in a doctor's daily work.
Several medical professors were on hand during the test to review and evaluate each student's progress. The students were divided into groups of ten and each group had 80 minutes to go through all the treatment rooms and effectively deal with the different situations.
The OSCE is an exam of objective, structured skills that all medical students must pass when they finish the last year of the undergraduate programme.
The examination evaluates six skills: basic clinical skills; communication skills; technical skills; management of the diagnostic and therapeutic plan and monitoring; approach to family and community; and preventive activities.
The UIC is one of the Spanish universities that focuses on preparing undergraduate medical students for this exam so they have a better chance of successfully passing it.
