Introduction to Clinical Medicine Course for Teaching Basic Clinical Skills

Lee, Young Mee; Ahn, Duck Sun; Kim, Byoung Soo; Park, Jung Yeul

Abstract

BACKGROUND: One of major weakness in medical education in Korea is clinical skills has not been uniformly well taught during undergraduate period. To reinforce the basic clinical skill education, we developed introduction to clinical medicine(ICM) course In this study, we described the ICM course development process and the experience.
METHODS
We performed comprehensive literature review related to ICM and doctoring curriculum. ICM/OSCE sub-commitee members discussed several time to develop the course. To assess the level of accomplishment of this course, we got feedback from 115 third year medical students by questionnaires.
RESULTS
ICM was composed of 9 topics which covers the basic clinical skills. For each topic, three hours per week was allocated, one hour for didactic session and the other 2 hours for practical exercise. Standardized patients were used to teach interview skill. Most of students revealed history taking, abdominal examination, musculo-skeletal system, and interview skill session were valuable learning experience. However, for Gynecology and Pediatric session which were taught by mainly lectures, students evaluated them negatively. INTERPRETATION: This year, we focused on teaching basic clinical skills at ICM. However, our ultimate goal is to develop the ICM course which can allow the students to learn both the art and the science of Medicine.