Clinical Skills Assessment Center

The Clinical Skills Assessment Center (CSAC) provides formative evaluation to medical students and residents and other trainees in:

• Communication skills;
• History taking;
• Physical exam skills;
• Development of differential diagnosis;
• Initial diagnostic work-up;
• Documentation of a patient encounter;
• Selected training situations in patient management.

Goals

• Provide well-trained standardized patients for standardized simulated encounters.
  • Patients will be trained in goals, objectives, standardized portrayal of cases,
    scoring and delivery of simulation feedback to students.
• To develop and implement cases that enhance student learning.
  • Cases will be standardized
  • Cases will facilitate learning in clinical reasoning
  • Cases will reflect educational goals for students.
  • Cases will reflect core clinical problems as reflected in the simulation encounter.
  • Cases will encourage development of differential diagnoses that consider urgent problems.
  • Cases will augment clinical experience to address domains not commonly covered in other venues (i.e. domestic violence, delivering bad news, obtaining informed consent).
• To provide formative evaluation to students through standardized patients' feedback following the simulation case.
• To provide formative evaluation to students through faculty feedback.

Objectives

After formative and summative evaluation, students will be able to:

• Communicate effectively with standardized patients in order to develop an approach to the patient problem.
• Formulate an appropriate differential diagnosis.
• Take an appropriate extended problem-focused history and
• Perform an extended focused physical exam appropriate for the differential diagnosis.
• Construct a plan for crucial initial diagnostic workup.
• Appropriately document the encounter.

For selected training situations:

• Develop an accurate problem list;
• Design a plan of management for the patient.