The need to have a Clinical Skills Center in a School of Medicine originated in Medical Education in the 1960s and has been evolving to adapt to the requirements of current medical education.
Our Center was created in 1997 with the appointment of a committee to establish a Standardized Patients Program in our School of Medicine. The first name of the Clinical Skills Center (CSC) was the Standardized Patients Program, and the conceptual idea came from Dr. Antonio Méndez Iglesias, who was the Director of Curriculum Office at that time.
The first Clinical Director of the Standardized Patient Program was Dr. Luis Jorge Rodríguez who had the task of directing the logistics of the first standardized clinical skills examinations, the so-called OSCEs, from 1998 to 2002. This included the development of rubrics and evaluative checklists, such as the Communication Skills Process Scale, among many other aspects. Mrs. Lizette A. García-Rodríguez has been the Program Officer of the CSC from its beginnings to the present. Ms. García is currently the person in charge of developing and implementing the protocols to recruit and train the collaborators who will perform the roles of standardized patients and carry out the coordination of the administrative matters of the CSC.
After Dr. Luis Jorge Rodríguez, Dr. Débora Silva was the Clinical Director from 2002 to 2005, then succeeded by Dr. Nerian Ortiz from 2005 to 2015 and Dr. Yasmin Pedrogo from 2015 to 2023. Currently, Dr. María López Quintero is the Clinical Director of the Center, a position she has held since September 2023.
In 1998, the first examination to assess the clinical skills of medical students in their final year before graduation, the Clinical Performance Examination (CPX) exam, was offered with the support of the School of Medicine faculty. Over the years, this exam has assessed whether our medical school students are competent in history taking, physical examination, communication skills and critical thinking skills to be able to graduate. In addition, the CSC offers a clinical skills assessment exam at the end of the second year, better known as the CSA, which is a requirement for promotion to the clinical years.
The Standardized Patient Program has evolved in the offering of OSCEs from the pre-clinical years with the Introduction to Clinical Skills and Fundamentals of Clinical Skills courses to the clinical years having them in all the third-year clerkships.
Since 2013, its facilities have been located on the fifth floor of the Guillermo Arbona Main Building of the Medical Sciences Campus.