As a criterion of competence, performance-based assessment methods have been used in the health professions for centuries, and dozens of studies of their psychometric characteristics have been reported over the last several decades. Performance-based assessment methods, commonly used in medical education, include written clinical simulations (PMPs), computer-based clinical simulations, role-playing oral examinations, and standardized patient (SP) simulations. The underlying rationale for utilizing performance-based assessments is that they are tools with which one can appropriately evaluate medical students and reinforce what they have learned throughout their undergraduate studies.
SPs are being widely used across the curriculum because of their potential advantages: from medical interviewing and physical diagnosis courses to clinical clerkships to residency training. The primary
objective
for SP encounters is to assist in the formation of fundamental medical interviewing and to improve clinical skills. However, as the program matures, SPs could be used at more advanced levels of medical training and be used to evaluate examinees, as well as obtain feedback on how well the educational program is working, at all levels including residency, continuing medical education for physicians, and even as a way to assess the abilities of foreign medical school graduates.
Implementing an SP program will permit Korean medical educators to prospectively identify critical skills for their students to learn and establish explicit performance criteria for clinical competence.
This study demonstrates why Korean SP programs should be implemented in the early stages in the medical education program, how to train SPs, and how to apply an SP program in an innovative curriculum, how to study about it, and how to disseminate SP programs throughout the Korean medical educational system.
