Whether she mentions the blood depends on how she is asked: an OSCE station in the student's own words
For communication-skills teachers and simulation-centre heads: a rehearsal before the first session with a standardised patient that scores how the student behaves, not only what they ask, and a clear view of what it does not cover yet.
The Library now has a voice station built on the 2023 OSCE passport «History-taking», primary accreditation. The student plays an outpatient general practitioner; the patient is Kamila, 30, who has booked an appointment. A ten-minute timer runs with start and end signals. She answers in a recorded voice with subtitles, and the student either speaks into the microphone or types. It opens without an account.
In the history-taking station released earlier the student picks the doctor's actions from a list. Here there is no list: every line is the student's own, and the patient reacts to how it is put.
Kamila is embarrassed, and the case is built around it
She starts with constipation. The bright red blood after a bowel movement, the feeling that something protrudes and her fear of cancer come out later, and only part of them may come out at all. The station has five endings: she tells everything; the main complaint is out but the protrusion or the fear is not; she talks only about constipation; she leaves without an examination after false reassurance; she leaves feeling that nobody needs her problem.
The interview ends with the phrase «Let's move on to the examination» (in the case, «Перейдём к осмотру»). After it the student writes, as if to the examiner, the complaints found and the working hypotheses.
What the student sees after the ten minutes
The ending reached, and a table of what the patient told and what she kept back.
Where the conversation left the optimal path, a «Next time» note, and the optimal path itself.
The checklist: 14 items of the passport and three added for this case, namely confidentiality, support when she is embarrassed, and a respectful pace without hurrying her. Eye contact is not assessed in a voice station.
The student's conclusion next to the reference list of complaints and hypotheses given in the case.
The endings not reached, and the full transcript of the conversation.
Several checklist items are about behaviour rather than content: letting the patient finish without interrupting, and not firing a series of questions in one line. In the choice-based version these are hard to show; in free speech they are visible in the transcript.
Three ways to use it in a class
Before the first session with a standardised patient, let each student run the station once, then compare the endings across the group and look at the line after which Kamila stopped talking.
Pair it with the choice-based history-taking station: first the list of actions, then the same task in the student's own words.
Use the transcript in the seminar: ask students to find the line where the conversation left the optimal path and to rephrase it.
The case is a draft that still has to be checked by a physician, and the note is visible on the task, station and debrief screens. The case text and the patient's voice are in Russian only; the interface follows the site language. The attempt is kept only in the student's own browser, and there is no teacher view of results yet. The patient appears as a silhouette rather than a 3D figure. A spoken line can last up to 60 seconds, and when speech recognition is unavailable the station switches the student to typing.