Effectiveness of an occupational and environmental medicine curriculum as indicated by evaluation of medical student performance on an objective structured clinical examination

Medical students must learn to recognize occupational and environ mental-re lated illness, An occupational and environmental medicine curriculum can ac hieve this goal. The curriculum must be evaluated to ensure that medical st udents are learning to recognize exposure-related health conditions and to evaluate if this ability correlates with medical interviewing skills, A cas e, formatted for an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), was d eveloped to evaluate student performance on an exposure-related clinical pr oblem, The OSCE results were analyzed to identify the areas that differenti ated the students who recognized an exposure-related medical condition from those who did not. We conclude that an OSCE is an effective curriculum eva luation toot to assess whether a core occupational and environmental-relate d curriculum is contributing to student learning in exposure history-taking and associated clinical reasoning skills.