Got Skills?: A New Era of Developing and Assessing Clinical Skills in the Remote Environment

Background

Traditionally, many programs taught interprofessional and clinical skills conventionally, in-person, at a dedicated practice laboratory or through experiential clerkships (Hao et al., 2002). The global pandemic, with its institutional and state-mandated public health restrictions, forced educators to emergently identify and learn new ways and technologies to deliver, teach, and assess clinical skill performance in this newly developed remote environment. Due to the social distancing requirements during the pandemic, many of the clinical skills that were traditionally learned and performed with standardized or simulated patients had to become virtual encounters (Agu et al., 2021). This has required educators to make it a priority to incorporate the appropriate tools for effective student learning. To optimize clinical skills development for learners, in the remote or online environment, the use of virtual simulation and other platforms such as videoconferencing or telehealth had to be explored and examined (Lara et al., 2020). Designed to assess clinical and theoretical knowledge, one of the most common forms of assessment for clinical skills and professional competence is the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) (Harden et al., 1975). This has been used throughout medical education to ensure that the learners are achieving the necessary clinical milestones at various points within their curriculum. During the pandemic, the traditional OSCE has been adapted to a high-stakes virtual OSCE and its success has been documented in the literature (Lara et al., 2020). Several studies have delved into the use of software and digital tools with which to deliver course content, and assessing interprofessional and clinical skills. (Johnson et al, 2021; Watari et al., 2020) For example, some of the simulated educational and learning platforms used through the pandemic which will be highlighted in this chapter include EHR Go^TM, Simulation IQ^TM, and MyDispense^TM

As innovative, state of the art digital learning tools become readily available for higher educational venues, academic institutions need to invest the time and resources to research and adopt novel programs and platforms to transform the learning experience of health professional students. Additionally, educators must assess the effectiveness of such digital programs and platforms to ensure the students' acquisition of clinical skills and progression towards professional competence (McCutcheon et al., 2015). There also needs to be a goal of the academic institutions to providing faculty with the essential development, establishment, and infrastructure to support the usage of these digital software. By integrating some of these digital tools into a curriculum, and simultaneously providing the support system required for students and faculty, academic success within this venue will be inevitable.