Qualitative Assessment of the First Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) in Psychiatry in Iran.

The psychiatric OSCE was experimentally conducted for the first time in Iran at the level of subspecialties in August 2004. We aimed to qualitatively evaluate the attending professors’ and psy-chiatry residents’ viewpoints in order to understand the advantages, deficiencies, difficulties and suggestions of professors and residents in this regard. In this qualitative study, focused group discussion method of the attending professors and psychiatry residents participating in this test was used on the day of testing. Two focused group discussion sessions were conducted each including 8-10 participants. According to attending professors and psychiatry residents, fairness was the most significant advantage of OSCE. The most im-portant failure of OSCE, according to psychiatry residents, was being artificial in the station environment and lack of an appropriate rapport with the unreal patient. Attending professors pointed out that OSCE is pretty time-consuming and costly. Main suggestions they offered for optimization of OSCE included more further training of standard patients as well as displaying already prepared movies from real pa-tients in some of stations. In professors’ and residents’ point of view, psychiatric OSCE has significant advantages over current testing for psychiatric residents. However, providing a successful OSCE in the upcoming years requires that the aforementioned problems be cleared by further training of standard patients and applying other suggestions cited by the professors and residents.