Background Objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) has proved to be a reliable and valid tool for assessing the communications skills of medical students. As a consequence of introducing the practice-oriented education of pharmacy students into the clinical pharmacy curriculum, the assessment of training success also has to be re-structured. Up till now, only very few voluntary OSCEs are being performed at the pharmacy faculties in the investigated country.

Purpose To implement a reliable and valid OSCE using self-developed evaluation checklists for pharmacy students at a clinical pharmacy Institute.

Material and methods 38 students in the 6th semester of their pharmacy studies took the OSCE during the summer term of 2014. The students’ success was assessed by experts (pharmacists) using self-developed evaluation checklists. The reliability of the checklists was analysed by inter-rater agreement (kappa). Post-hoc all six experts separately evaluated the performance of six students in each of the six OSCE examination units (insulin administration, inhalation, compliance, interaction, over-the-counter medicines, drug information) which was video recorded during the OSCE.

Results According to the results of the evaluation checklists 36 students (95%) passed the exam. The overall medium inter-rater agreement regarding the six units was moderate (k = 0.49). The highest inter-rater agreement was recorded for insulin administration (k = 0.83) and the lowest inter-rater agreement regarding the interaction check (k = 0.22).

Conclusion The design of the OSCE proved to be satisfactory and the evaluation checklists developed turned out to be a reliable fair tool for assessing communication skills in clinical pharmacy.

References and/or acknowledgements No conflict of interest.