The assessment of clinical practice in osteopathic education: Is there a need to define a gold standard?

In the United Kingdom, assessment of clinical practice in medical education has proved to be a consistently difficult process. Central to these difficulties are issues surrounding the validity, reliability and feasibility of assessment of clinical practice that accurately reflect student abilities, whilst also representing 'real life' examples of patient care. Currently there is no consensus as to what might be regarded as best practice in clinical assessment within UK general medicine. Osteopathic institutions within the UK have an educational, professional and ethical obligation to ensure that their assessment satisfies all these criteria. However, it is arguable that there is also a need to ensure that standards exist between schools so that all Students graduating from different programmes are comparably assessed to a standard that may be valid and reliable. Although the framework exists for the development of consensus for clinical assessment for osteopaths in the UK, there has been no formal discussion within the profession to date. A constructive and pragmatic approach in identifying a suitable standard in clinical education in the UK may be to identify best practice between schools as to how the assessment of students may be delivered, and then to identify how best to ensure that this assessment is consistently and appropriately delivered across schools. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.