Clinical performance assessment is a complex process which plays a significant role in determining a students’ readiness for practice. Challenges include reliability and validity issues with assessment tools, anxiety and reluctance to fail students demonstrating unsafe or incompetent practice and conflicting roles when acting as practice educator and assessor. Lack of transparency and robustness of these processes can ultimately impact on service provision and patient safety. It is imperative therefore, that rigorous assessment methods and optimum training of practice educators are demonstrated. Student failure has serious implications on subsequent career choice, notwithstanding the stress endured by practice educators engaged in decision making processes involving underperforming students. Physiotherapy literature exploring this subject is limited despite anecdotal evidence of these problems. The overall research aim is to provide an evidence base to support the clinical performance assessment process of physiotherapy students in Ireland, using a stakeholder-centred approach to identify areas for its enhancement, thus optimising patient safety and health service delivery.
The research objectives are:
· To conduct a systematic review synthesising evidence on the psychometric and edumetric properties of clinical performance assessment tools used in physiotherapy.
· To explore observation-based assessment as a method of assessing student clinical performance through examination of the literature.
· To explore factors informing the decision-making processes of practice educators when assessing students.
· To identify the challenges and facilitators of this process experienced by physiotherapy students, practice educators and practice education support staff affiliated with Irish HEI’s.
· To elicit preferences of these stakeholders towards optimisation of this process.
This research will use a mixed methods approach. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews will be employed for data collection. Thematic analysis will be used, guided by a theoretical framework to support findings. Discrete Choice Experiment technique will examine stakeholder preferences. Findings will direct improvement of the process benefitting stakeholders and service users.
