Practise the OSCE assessment station with a simulated patient

We have added something to the platform that we have not seen anywhere else at this price, so it is worth explaining what it is and what it is not.

You can now sit an OSCE assessment station by having a conversation. A scenario opens, you get your reading time, and then you are in the room with a patient you talk to in your own words. You ask what you would ask. The patient answers as that patient would, including being vague when a real person would be vague, and you have to notice what you have not been told yet. Clinical data is there when you go looking for it, the way observations are on a chart rather than announced to you. When the time is up you get a report that goes through the criteria one at a time, says whether each was met, and quotes the part of your conversation it judged that on.

Two things about how it is marked are worth being clear on, because they are the parts that make it useful rather than flattering.

The patient does not know the mark scheme. This sounds like a small detail and it is the whole thing. A simulated patient that has seen the criteria will steer you toward them, because it is trying to be helpful, and you will end up being told what to ask. The report will then look excellent and will have measured nothing. Ours cannot do that, because the criteria are not given to the patient at all.

The verdict is worked out from the criteria rather than asked for. The marking judges each criterion on its own and the pass or fail is then applied as a rule over those judgements, which is the same rule the real station uses. Every essential criterion has to be met and no red flag can have been raised. That means the report can tell you that you met all but one criterion and still did not pass the station, which is uncomfortable and is exactly what you need to hear before the day rather than after it.

Now the limits, because they matter. This is one station, the assessment scenario. The real OSCE has more, and the four physical skills stations are not simulated here at all, because you cannot practise handwashing or a subcutaneous injection by typing. The verdict is a simulated one, marked against our own criteria, and it is not a prediction of how an NMC assessor would mark you. Nobody can offer you that, and a site that says it can is telling you something it cannot know.

What it is good for is the thing candidates find hardest and get the least practice at, which is holding a structured assessment together while a real person talks back. Attempts run on credits, and the longer access plan comes with a set of them.