Multiple Station Clinical Orientation for Undergraduate Education

Ahn, Duck Sun

Abstract

The socio-economic environment of the Republic of Korea is currently on the threshold of becoming that of developed country upon graduating from the league of developing countries and we are seeking i nternationalization and globalization of our society. There have been a great pressure of demands for changes in Korean medical education in line with the new socio-economic and technological changes and developments, but unfortunately there have been very little changes in Korean medical education curriculum which has been used since 1970. There appears to be a lot of disparities between the Korean medical education curriculum and those of the developed countries and our medical curriculum lags way behind in its quality standards as the medical education curricula in the North American countries and British Commonwealth countries have consistently revised and improved ever since 1970s with progress of their medical education programs, In this context it won't be an exaggeration at all even if we say that the watershed where the medical education curricula of the developed countries and that of the Korean medical education begins from the clinical practice. According to the medical education curriculum which we are applying presently, there are many cases of skipping the preparation steps and procedures in attending clinical practice sessions and this has been the main reason why the students who are on clinical practice have been unable to perform practices properly and they merely become spectators or observers due to their fear complexes and lack of clinical skill competencies. In order to tackle this problem the Medical Education Council of Korea University prepared a foundation of improvement by conducting a questionaire research on the 1993 clinical practices. Based on this research we introduced a clinical practice orientation program for a duration of one week by reducing the duration of summer vacation but without changing the 1993 curriulum. During the orientation period we tried to minimize classroom teaching and emphasized manual skill competency development based on clinical practices whereby students rotated educational stations by forming groups of 8 persons each. I, hereby, report this successful case of experiment as we have gained a high level of favorable responses from the students of the corresponding school years upon implementation of the new initiatives in three consecutive years, i.e. in 1993, 1994 and 1995.