gms | German Medical Science

Clinical skill need practical training and feedback for learning them. To ensure patient safety is an important issue in this respect. Consequently, numerous skills labs have been established over the last decades. However, it is unclear, which skill can be learnt or prepared for practical clinical performance training by e-learning applications. In this presentation the background for this field of educational research and activities is described as well as examples for history taking and communication skills and clinical examination skills are presented. The use of e-learning to prepare for clinical experiences with standardized or real patients has led to better preparation of students, more standardized training and is also promising as a method for assessing the cognitive parts of clinical skills by means of key feature or situational judgement tests. Further studies are needed to explore the contributions of e-learning to teach and assess clinical skills.