Newly-qualified optometrist, Eliza Jane McCall, has spoken to OT about her recent experience of the Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCE), sharing her advice and tips.
McCall sat and passed the OCSEs in July as the final step in her Scheme for Registration journey to qualification after sharing her pre-registration journey through OT.
Discussing her experience of the final practical exam, McCall described: “You’ve got five minute stations, and you have to walk in, complete a task. It can be absolutely anything. In total you do 17 stations, but you’re tested on 14 stations. One is a pilot station and there are two rest stations.”
She explained that the instructions for each station are on the door outside, you get a minute to read the instructions, a sound is made to alert you to enter, and you go in to see a patient sitting waiting and an examiner observing.
McCall noted that the process takes around an hour and a half to complete, “but you don’t even think about the time.”
Acknowledging the pressure linked to the final hurdle to qualification, McCall told OT: “It’s the big thing that everyone talks about,” adding: “You build it up for over a year and it’s over in an hour and a half.”
McCall found colleagues and peers’ advice valuable.
“Everyone had said ‘you do it all day, every day, it will be fine,’” she said, adding that as a result she “felt ok” when examination day came around.
Reflecting after sitting the OSCEs, McCall said she wished she had put more importance on the resources that were available to her for revision. She shared her discovery of example actor scripts a day prior to the examinations, which she found helpful – and which “gave me insight into what the actors are doing.”
She would also have practised direct ophthalmoscopy “just a little bit more,” as well as introducing herself to patients if she was it sit the OSCEs again.
McCall acknowledged that preparing for a practical exam is “tricky,” highlighting that aspects such as from what distance to do the different colour vision tests as “stuff you just have to read through.”
She reassured: “In a way you’re preparing the entire time. What they test you on in the OSCEs is the same thing that they test you on in Stage 1, the same thing in Stage 2 – so the whole time, you are preparing.”
Having focused on a structured revision process around a month prior to the OSCEs, she used flash card and utilised friends, taking them into store to practice on her days off.
In the lead up to the OSCEs, McCall found it helpful to be in practice, seeing patients as much as possible. While she did spend some days at home, she wanted to be in practice with real patients.
Reflecting on the OSCEs, she concluded: “It definitely wasn’t easy, but it was a lot simpler than I thought.”
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