Objective: Because both clerks and medical faculty quality management workers expressed the need for it, we aimed to develop a compact, valid and uniform instrument to assess the quality of Dutch clinical clerkships across all medical faculties in the Netherlands.
Method: We divided all 249 items from existing published and unpublished clerkship quality instruments into the three essential learning environment domains: content, atmosphere and organisation. In a 3-stage Delphi procedure, the 45 most relevant items from this list were selected that comprehensively covered the three domains. All clinical clerks in the country's northeastern educational region were invited to evaluate their last clerkship using this draft instrument. We used half of these data for item reduction and the other half to validate the final instrument, the QUality Instrument for ClerKships (QUICK).
Results: After the Delphi procedure and further item reduction, the QUICK comprises 15 items, 5 in each domain. The internal consistency of the QUICK and each of the three domains was satisfactory (Cronbach's α 0.88, 0.73, 0.84 and 0.67, respectively). The variance of the draft instrument domain scores were explained for >80% by item variance of the final QUICK. A panel of educational experts and medical faculty quality management workers evaluated QUICK's face validity as good.
Conclusion: The QUICK is a concise and valid instrument to assess the quality of Dutch clinical clerkships. Its repeated use in a quality cycle can contribute to monitoring and ongoing development of the quality of this key phase in the medical education curriculum.