The Australasian Collaboration for Clinical Assessment in Medicine (ACCLAiM) commenced in 2010.  An absence of accessible national data regarding student performance in clinical exams led to the recognition that there was a need to benchmark students’ attainment of core clinical competencies in a way that usefully informed medical schools about the efficacy of their teaching and assessment.

ACCLAiM is a collaborative venture between medical schools in Australia and New Zealand that focuses on benchmarking graduate outcomes in the clinical domain. The project focuses on the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) and demonstrates an innovative way of enabling Australasian medical schools to collaborate in benchmarking and improve quality assurance practices in the assessment of medical students’ clinical competence.

Current participating Australian and New Zealand Medical Schools are listed in the website footer.

The collaboration acknowledges the different curriculum structures and assessment points amongst the courses offered by the partner medical schools. The ACCLAiM group use similar horizontal and vertically integrated outcomes based curricula and they have identified points in their respective curricula where benchmarking of clinical performance could reasonably occur. The group has sought to focus on benchmarking cohort performance at the end of the first year of clinical rotations and the last clinical ‘exit’ examination held in each course.