MOSCEs!

I finally got to posting this a couple days late, but this Tuesday was the infamous MOSCEs, or Mock OSCEs. OSCE stands for objective structured clinical examination. Quite a mouthful, but basically it is a standard examination that I think most health professional schools have. In order to prove that you are competent to enter the clinic as an intern and work with actual patients, you need to pass these tests. They are a little bit scary because you have a limited time to get a lot done, but that's why it's really great that the academic reps set up an event like the MOSCEs.

As a second year in first semester, OSCE 1 involves just doing relevant physical exams for a given patient case. So you're given a patient case, for example someone coming in with a cough, and then you have 20 minutes to do every physical exam that is relevant. Did I mention that you need to speak out loud saying everything that you see hear and feel (kind of difficult when wearing a stethoscope!). Oh and you need to say an abnormal finding for every test you do that you could've seen or heard, and what disease/disorder that could indicate. In a way it's actually pretty cool though because we get standardized patients and we'll be doing the test in the clinic, so it will be almost like a real patient interaction. The MOSCEs were just done in some of the classrooms, but it was nice because we had 3rd and 4th year students evaluating and timing us, so it really brought the stress on. I've been prepping a lot for this test and fortunately the MOSCEs went really well and it looks like I'm going to be okay, though I'll definitely need to do a lot more studying before exams start, a week from Monday. Only 8 exams this time around (I think it was 9 last fall?). Back to studying!