Development and national consensus finding on patient-centred high stakes communication skills assessments for the Swiss Federal Licensing Examination in Medicine

Bachmann, C.; Kropf, R.; Biller, S.; Schnabel, K. P.; Junod Perron, N.; Monti, M.; Berendonk, C.; Huwendiek, S.; Breckwoldt, J. (2021). Development and national consensus finding on patient-centred high stakes communication skills assessments for the Swiss Federal Licensing Examination in Medicine. Patient education and counseling, 104(7), pp. 1765-1772. Elsevier Ireland 10.1016/j.pec.2020.12.003

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Objective
To describe and evaluate a consensus finding and expert validation process for the development of patient-centred communication assessments for a national Licensing Exam in Medicine.

Methods
A multi-professional team of clinicians and experts in communication, assessment and role-play developed communication assessments for the Swiss Federal Licensing Examination. The six-month process, informed by a preceding national needs-assessment, an expert symposium and a critical literature review covered the application of patient-centred communication frameworks, the development of assessment guides, concrete assessments and pilot-tests. The participants evaluated the process.

Results
The multiple-step consensus process, based on expert validation of the medical and communication content, led to six high-stakes patient-centred communication OSCE-assessments. The process evaluation revealed areas of challenge such as calibrating rating-scales and case difficulty to the graduates’ competencies and integrating differing opinions. Main success factors were attributed to the outcome-oriented process and the multi-professional exchange of expertise. A model for developing high stakes patient-centred communication OSCE-assessments was derived.

Conclusions
Consensus finding was facilitated by using well-established communication frameworks, by ensuring outcome-orientated knowledge exchange among multi-professional experts, and collaborative validation of content through experts.

Practice implications
We propose developing high-stakes communication assessments in a multi-professional expert consensus and provide a conceptual model.

Keywords
Assessment
Federal licensing examination
Patient-centred communication

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