Teaching Clinical Medicine: What and How?

Lee, Soo Jung

Abstract

Traditional curricula of clinical medicine had generally failed to help medical students make efficient clinicians. Several aims can be suggested for the curriculum development in order to resolve the shortcomings. 1. To make students motivated and oriented when they learn: by early exposure, either direct or indirect, to patients and to clinical situation. 2. To deliver adequate amount and range of information: by differentiating between common basics and electives, and according to importance or frequency. 3. To encourage the students to learn how to find, decide, and organize what they need to learn: in order to make them life-long self learners. 4. To have the students follow the reasoning process of clinical decision as they learn: as well as to let them get used to the uncertainty of clinical situation. 5. To let students acquire knowledge assembled with the relevant attitude and skills: in the context as close as possible to the situation of clinical practice so that they become competent and well performing. 6. To equip students with non-biomedical competence: broadening the perspectives of disease, patient, and society. In order to achieve these aims, clinical medicine should be taught in the educational environment which is student-centered, problem-oriented, integrated, and systematic.