Clinical Skills Assessment Center
Statement of Purpose

The Clinical Skills Assessment Center serves to
Provide formative evaluation to medical students and residents and other trainees in:

Communication skills
History taking
Physical Exam skills
Development of differential diagnosis
Initial diagnostic workup
Documentation of a patient encounter
And for selected training situations in patient management.

The overall goals are to

1. Provide well-trained standardized patients for standardized simulated encounters.
Patients will be trained in goals, objectives, standardized portrayal of cases,
scoring, and delivery of feedback to students.

2. To develop and implement cases that enhance student learning
Cases will be standardized
Cases will facilitate learning in clinical reasoning
Cases will reflect educational goals for students.
Cases will reflect core clinical problems.
Cases will encourage development of differential diagnoses that consider urgent problems.
Cases will augment clinical experience to address domains not commonly covered in other venues (eg domestic violence, delivering bad news, obtaining
informed consent)

3. To provide formative evaluation to students through standardized patients' feedback

4. To provide formative evaluation to students through faculty feedback

Clinical Skills Assessment Objectives:
After formative and summative evaluation, students will be able to Communicate effectively with standardized patients in order to develop an approach to the patient problem.
Formulate an appropriate differential diagnosis.
Take an appropriate extended problem-focused history and
Perform an extended focused physical exam appropriate for the differential diagnosis.
Construct a plan for crucial initial diagnostic workup.
Appropriately document the encounter.
For selected training situations:
Develop an accurate problem list
Design a plan of management for the patient