غلامرضا میرسپاسی

The increasing use of standardized patients in the psy-chiatric Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) promoted the investigators to explore the viewpoints of examining professors and participating psychiatric residents towards the performance of the standardized patients. In an OSCE, 22 of the final year psychiatric residents and 16 examiners participated in our study. Performance of the 8 standardized patients in all 8 stations was evaluated after the test. This study showed acceptable and appropriate performance of standardized patients both in acting according to and in actualizing the scenarios. Use of standardized patients in psychiatric OSCE is recommended by the examining professors and also residents

Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is used for comprehensive exams for the residents and board of specialists in psychiatry. In a guided survey performed by Iran, Tehran, and Isfahan�Universities of Medical Sciences in the Behavioral Sciences Research Center (BSRC) in Isfahan, validity and reliability of OSCE in psychiatry were evaluated as well as familiarizing psy-chiatry residents and consultants with it. The study was conducted to measure the validity and reliability of OSCE in psychiatry autumn, 2005 in BSRC in Isfahan. A 3-day workshop was therefore held, in which 22 consultant psychiatrist and 22 psychiatry residents participated and 6 10-minute stations were also designed. To assess validity, face validity method and to assess reliability, inter-station reliability and internal con-sistency, contingency coefficient and parallel reliability were used. The mean of checklist total scores for the residents was 84.28 (standard deviation=11.91). Agreement coefficient between the raters’ scores (in all 6 stations) was 0.96 with the correlation coefficient of 0.82. Pearson correlation coefficient between checklist scores and the global score was calculated as r=0.89 (p<0.001). Test validity was at a very good level. Oral examination of OSCE in psychiatry is feasible for residents in this field and bears appropriate validity and reliability.

This study aims to compare viewpoints of standardized patients (SPs) and consultant psychiatrists about the performance of volunteer residents in the first Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) in Iran. OSCE was hold with 9 stations and 8 SPs, in one day with attendance of 22 senior psychiatric residents. In each station two raters independently scored the residents based on a previously prepared checklist. SPs were three females and five males with the mean age of 27 years. In the end, viewpoints of consultant psychi-atrists and SPs on the performance of residents were compared. Beside three stations, no significant correlation between SPs’ and consultants’ opinions could be found in other stations. SPs in the stations with significant correlation had higher level of educa-tion especially in the psychiatry-relevant fields. Despite capabilities of the SPs, it is probably not reason- able to rely on their opinion as raters unless they have higher level of education.

This study was designed to investigate the possibility of dopaminergic involve-ment in obsessive-compulsive patients (OCD). Method This double-blind study compared the efficacy of fluoxetine-haloperidol with that of fluoxetine-placebo in two groups, each comprised of 12 subjects. These subjects with obsessive-compulsive disorders were selected on the basis of DSM-IV diagnostic criteria; they were asse- ssed by a demographic questionnaire and Yale-Brown Scale for evaluating obsessive-compul- sive disorders. Findings The results showed that the response to treatment in haloperidol-fluoxetine group was somewhat better than the fluoxetine-placebo group from the first week of the study. The difference was significant at the third visit (end of fourth week). Results In addition to serotonin neurotransmitter system, dopaminergic system may play a role in pathophysiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder.