Medical students ace Telehealth with the help of Royal Perth Hospital
Royal Perth Hospital Outpatient Clinic Rooms were recently used to support the University of WA (UWA) WA Medical Students Society (WAMSS) annual mock Objective Structured Clinical Exams (OSCE) event for final year medical students, which included the inaugural use of telehealth stations.
Telehealth Coordinator, Nandhini Natarajan and A/Outpatient Manager, Kim Hill coordinated four telehealth virtual rooms and video links to assist WAMSS to host another successful event. These stations consisted of a final year student hosting a consult with a remote patient and examiner who were dialing in via HealthDirect video conferencing.
The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at UWA chose to include telehealth stations in the 2020 OSCE given the impact of digital healthcare during the COVID-19 response and growing demand beyond the pandemic. These stations involved patient interactions via video-conference and required students to comply with patient identification, information security and accessibility criteria.
While the use of digital technology in healthcare is becoming more prevalent, these scenarios provided valuable experience for the future medical professionals of WA who have previously only experienced face-to-face clinics or shadowed medical teams on hospital wards.
This event organised by academic officers Ayeesha Thevar and Tithi Kulkarni involved the participation of more than 450 medical registrars, RMOs, interns and medical students, and is an important event for the WAMSS student body as it provides the opportunity for final year medical students to familiarise themselves with the exam environment, while receiving valuable feedback about their clinical performance from junior doctors who have previously completed the OSCE.
The WAMSS student body expressed their deepest gratitude to RPH and all those involved in running another successful event.
“Having these telehealth stations made available with the help of Royal Perth Hospital has been incredibly helpful to us students and has made us feel more prepared for our upcoming exams,” said WAMSS President Oliver Dearsley.
Royal Perth Bentley Group looks forward to continuing to work with University staff and clinicians to continue to support medical students on their journey to becoming future clinicians within the WA healthcare system.
An OSCE is a widely used assessment method by medical schools that measures clinical competence by examining students in various simulated clinical scenarios arranged in to ten-minute stations. The formal 2020 OSCE exam for the UWA final year medical students covered the disciplines of anaesthetics, surgery, paediatrics, internal medicine, ophthalmology, emergency medicine, palliative care, oncology, psychiatry, general practice, obstetrics and gynaecology.