Designing Objective Structured Clinical Examination in Basic Community Pharmacy Clerkship Course and Assessment of Its Relationship with Conventional Exam

Background: Over 90% of pharmacy students’ work in pharmacies after graduation which needs both knowledge and skill, thus one of the most essential courses of their education is pharmacy clerkship. An important part of an educational program is the evaluation of the trainees. Different studies show that conventional written exams are not successful in evaluating the skills of the students and can mostly evaluate their knowledge. Thus Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is used to evaluate the students in different aspects. Methods: An OSCE and a conventional test were given to a group of students at the end of basic community pharmacy clerkship course. The OSCE test consisted of six different stations (reading prescriptions, identifying drugs, pharmacist’s recommendation, patient education, drug information resources, and drug usage instructions). Two questions were asked at each station by different examiners. The scores and results of these tests were compared and analyzed. Results: There was no significant correlation between OSCE final scores and written test scores (P: = 0.217). No significant correlation between each station’s score and the written test score was found. Conclusion: The absence of significant correlation between OSCE and conventional exams shows that the skills evaluated by OSCE cannot be evaluated by the best possible written tests. This type of examination is not commonly used in Iran’s pharmacy schools but due to the findings of this study, it seems that this multiform method, despite being more difficult to arrange, can be a more suitable and relevant way to evaluate basic community pharmacy clerkship compared to conventional written tests.