Development of a new instrument to assess clinical performance of residents in dermatology-venereology department

Abstract

Introduction: Performance assessment of residents should be achieved with evaluation procedures, informed by measured and current educational standards. The present study aimed to develop, test, and evaluate a psychometric instrument for evaluating clinical practice performance among Dermatology and Venereology (DV) residents. Methods: This is a qualitative and quantitative study conducted from 2014 to 2016. A pilot instrument was developed by 10 expert examiners from five universities to rate four video-recorded clinical performance, previously evaluated as good and bad performance. The next step was the application of the instrument to evaluate the residents which was carried out by the faculty of DV at two Universities. Results: The instrument comprised 11 components. There was a statistically significant difference (p < 0.001) between good and bad performance. Cronbach’s alpha documented high overall reliability ( = 0.96) and good internal consistency ( = 0.90) for each component. The new instrument correctly evaluated 95.0% of poor performance. The implementation study showed that inter-rater reliability between evaluators range from low to high (correlation coefficient  =0.79, p < 0.001). Conclusion: The instrument is a reliable and valid instrument for assessing clinical practice performance of DV residents. More studies are required to evaluate the instrument in different situation.