Designing an eOSCE for Competency-based Assessment of Nursing Procedures and Skilful Nursing Practice
Keywords:
Clinical skills, Competency-based assessment, Digital assessment, eOSCE, Nursing education, OSCEAbstract
Introduction: The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is a widely used method for assessing clinical competence in health-care education, originally introduced by Ronald Harden to address issues of subjectivity and inconsistency in traditional clinical examinations. It provides a standardised and objective framework in which all learners are evaluated on predefined skills under uniform conditions. Despite these advantages, the implementation of conventional OSCEs is resource-intensive, requiring substantial time, infrastructure, and financial investment.
Aim: The study aims to design, develop, and evaluate a web-based electronic Objective Structured Clinical Examination system (Sway eOSCE) for competency-based nursing assessment, and to examine its usability, feasibility, and potential for scalable integration into routine nursing education. It further assesses whether the platform can effectively replicate the traditional OSCE structure while reducing resource and infrastructure demands, and determines user acceptance as measured by the System Usability Scale (SUS).
Materials and Methods: This study describes the design and development of sway eOSCE, a web-based electronic OSCE system developed to support competency-based assessment of nursing procedures and clinical skills. A prototype software (Sway eOSCE) was developed and evaluated by 59 B.Sc. Nursing 5th-semester students, and also by 9 clinical instructors, to assess usability and functional coherence through a planned workshop on eOSCE.
Results: The sway eOSCE system achieved a mean System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 83.5, indicating a high level of usability and user acceptance. These findings suggest that sway eOSCE represents a promising approach for enhancing competency-based assessment in nursing education.
Conclusion: The sway eOSCE system offers potential advantages in terms of scalability, standardisation, and efficiency in clinical skills evaluation.
