Development of a tool to support holistic generic assessment of clinical procedure skills

Abstract

Context: The challenges of maintaining comprehensive banks of valid checklists make context-specific checklists for assessment of clinical procedural skills problematic.

Objectives: This paper reports the development of a tool which supports generic holistic assessment of clinical procedural skills.

Methods: We carried out a literature review, focus groups and non-participant observation of assessments with interview of participants, participant evaluation of a pilot objective structured clinical examination (OSCE), a national modified Delphi study with prior definitions of consensus and an OSCE. Participants were volunteers from a large acute teaching trust, a teaching primary care trust and a national sample of National Health Service staff. Results In total, 86 students, trainees and staff took part in the focus groups, observation of assessments and pilot OSCE, 252 in the Delphi study and 46 candidates and 50 assessors in the final OSCE. We developed a prototype tool with 5 broad categories amongst which were distributed 38 component competencies. There was > 70% agreement (our prior definition of consensus) at the first round of the Delphi study for inclusion of all categories and themes and no consensus for inclusion of additional categories or themes. Generalisability was 0.76. An OSCE based on the instrument has a predicted reliability of 0.79 with 12 stations and 1 assessor per station or 10 stations and 2 assessors per station.

Conclusions: This clinical procedural skills assessment tool enables reliable assessment and has content and face validity for the assessment of clinical procedural skills. We have designated it the Leicester Clinical Procedure Assessment Tool (LCAT).