• Annamaria Bagnasco, Angela Tolotti, Nicola Pagnucci, Giancarlo Torre, Fiona Timmins, Giuseppe Aleo, and Loredana Sasso.
• Department of Health Sciences, University of Genoa, Via Pastore 1, I-16132 Genoa, Italy. Electronic address: Annamaria.bagnasco@unige.it.
• Nurse Educ Today. 2016 Mar 1; 38: 54-60.

BackgroundWhile development, testing, and innovation of the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) are common in the international literature, studies from the United States of America (USA), Australia, and the United Kingdom (UK) predominate. There is little known about OSCE use in European countries, such as Italy, where other than cost analysis, there is little reporting of OSCE use or validation.ObjectivesThis paper reports on one Italian initiative, which evaluated the equity and objectivity of the OSCE method of assessing communication skills.DesignAn OSCE method was used to assess the communication skills of first-year students of the Degree Course in Nursing. A method of simulation was implemented through role-playing with standardized patients. An observational method was used to collect data.Participants And SettingsFour hundred and twenty-one first-year undergraduate nursing students at one university site in Italy took part.MethodsTen examination sessions were carried out. The students' performances were assessed by two examiners who used a structured observation grid and conducted their assessment separately. A situation simulated by four nurses with experience as actors was used as the topic for the students' examination.ResultsCalculation of the daily rate of students who passed the examination revealed a random distribution over time. The nonparametric correlation indexes referring to the assessments and to the scores assigned by the two examiners proved statistically significant (P≤0.001).ConclusionsThe study confirmed the validity of the OSCE method in ensuring equity and objectivity of communication skills assessment in a large population of nursing students for the purpose of certification throughout the duration of the examination. This has important implications for nurse education and practice as the extent to which OSCE approaches, while deemed objective, are culturally sensitive or valid and reliable across cultures is not clear. This is something that requires further research and examination in this field.Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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