Social Health Workers as Evaluators in Objectice Structured Clinical Examination: Evidences and Perspectives

Introduction: this study is aimed at investigating faculty’s and students’ perspective whether health social workers can be hired as substitute for evaluators or as a co-evaluator for clerkship students assesmet in community medicine course? Methods: this research is a cross-sectional study. The study has been conducted by participation of medical students assigned to pass comunity medicine course in January 2011. An OSCE designed for evaluation of medical students’ competencies. It consist of eight stations. In each health care center a faculty member and a social health worker were assigned for evaluation of students. For each station a chekclist devised to measure the competency and its validity was assured by experts. Its reliability was measured (α=0.83). All data was analyzed by SPSS software (version 14). Results: In all stations, except one, a significant corralation was measured between the results of faculty and health care workers evaluation (P<0.05, r=0.86). All faculties and instructors aknowledge that social health workers can not be trusted for medical students evaluatin. 83.3% declared that community medicine department can ask for health care workers to evaluate medical stuents globally. Conclusion: Considering social health care workers’ competencies, perhaps it is ineligible to ask for social health workers to evaluate medical students but they can participate in the exam as standard patients.