Evaluating the impact of simulation-based education on clinical psychology students' confidence and clinical competence

Lessons Learned and Preliminary Results from Implementing Simulation-Based Elements in a Clinical Psychology Programme

In a clinical psychology training context, there is a need to examine students’ theoretical knowledge as well as their professional competence. One promising method to assess students’ professional competence is the Objective and Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). In this report, we describe and discuss the implementation of OSCE on a clinical psychology programme at a university in Sweden, including lesson learned regarding the structure and content for this examination. We also report on preliminary results, in which we explored students’ perceived competence and worries, and their supervisors’ reports regarding their clinical practicum, in relation to a new curriculum that includes more simulation-based elements (including the OSCE) than the old curriculum. Results showed that students on the new curriculum reported lower levels of perceived competence before the clinical practicum, but increased significantly more over time in comparison to students on the old curriculum. These results are discussed in relation to the potential role of OSCE in clinical psychology students’ development of professional competence. Due to methodological limitations, these results should be interpreted with caution and should be viewed as exploratory. All in all, this report can be viewed as a guideline for implementation of OSCE on similar programmes in psychology.

Can Psychotherapy Trainees Distinguish Standardized Patients From Real Patients?

Abstract. Background: Under the new psychotherapy law in Germany, standardized patients (SPs) are to become a standard component in psychotherapy training, even though little is known about their authenticity. Objective: The present pilot study explored whether, following an exhaustive two-day SP training, psychotherapy trainees can distinguish SPs from real patients. Methods: Twenty-eight psychotherapy trainees ( M = 28.54 years of age, SD = 3.19) participated as blind raters. They evaluated six video-recorded therapy segments of trained SPs and real patients using the Authenticity of Patient Demonstrations Scale. Results: The authenticity scores of real patients and SPs did not differ ( p = .43). The descriptive results indicated that the highest score of authenticity was given to an SP. Further, the real patients did not differ significantly from the SPs concerning perceived impairment ( p = .33) and the likelihood of being a real patient ( p = .52). Conclusions: The current results suggest that psychotherapy trainees were unable to distinguish the SPs from real patients. We therefore strongly recommend incorporating training SPs before application. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.