Do primary health centres and hospitals contribute equally towards achievement of the transversal clinical competencies of medical students? Performance on the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) in competency acquisition

OBJECTIVES: The adaptation of the educational programmes of European faculties of medicine to the European Higher Education Area guidelines has focused curricula design on competence acquisition. Competencies are defined as the achievements of a predetermined level of efficacy in real-world scenarios. Our objective was to assess whether performance on a common competence evaluation test, the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), resulted in different scores for second-year students after a practical medical training course took place in a primary health centre (PHC) or in a hospital. DESIGN: A descriptive study was conducted during the 2010–2014 academic year of the OSCE test scores obtained by all second-year students. LOCATION: Faculty of Medicine at the University of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain). MAIN MEASUREMENTS: We performed a correlation analysis between students who completed their practical medical training at the PHC and hospitals utilising Student's t-test for comparison of means. RESULTS: 423 students who completed internships at the PHC and at hospitals obtained OSCE mean scores of 7.32 (SD; IC) (0.82; 7.18–7.47) points and 7.17 (0.83; 6.07–7.26) points, respectively (p = 0.07). CONCLUSIONS: Second-year medical students acquired similar competency levels in the two analysed training scenarios. The two areas both serve their teaching purpose.