Description and Early Outcomes of a Comprehensive Curriculum Redesign at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine (original) (raw)
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2024 The curriculum: The heart and soul of a medical school. By R M Harden et al.
Medical Teacher, 1–5. 1 November 2024, 2024
The importance of the curriculum In medical education, the curriculum is the blueprint for developing competent, ethical and adaptable healthcare professionals who can meet the needs of patients and society. The curriculum defines the structure, content and approach to training and assessing future physicians and how students engage with their learning. The curriculum is important for a number of reasons: it communicates to stakeholders including students, teachers, patients and the public more generally what can be expected of the education programme; it provides a benchmark for programme evaluation and for accreditation. If you are a teacher you have a role in designing and implementing the curriculum [1]. Indeed it can legitimately be argued that this is the teacher’s most important and challenging role and responsibility.
[Design and implementation of a competency-based curriculum for medical education]
Revista Peruana De Medicina Experimental Y Salud Publica, 2014
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Competency-based medical education (CBME) has been incorporated into graduate medical education accreditation and is being introduced in undergraduate medical education. Family medicine (FM) faculty at one institution developed a CBME FM clerkship to intentionally maintain the integrity of FM specialty-specific teaching during their institutional CBME curricular revision. METHODS: From the five FM domains (Access to Care, Continuity of Care, Comprehensive Care, Coordination of Care, and Contextual Care), 10 competencies and 23 FM educational activities (EAs) were defined. The set of EAs encompasses the wide scope of care available to FM clerkship students. Students complete four required EAs (preventive care, care transitions, chronic disease management, and acute care) and select four additional EAs matching their interests. EA selection frequency and course evaluations were assessed for the first cohort of learners (N=156; February 2016-July 2017). RESULTS: The most frequently selected EAs were: information coordination, procedures, and care of the family. The least selected were: patient e-communication, end-of-life care, and shared medical decision making. Student perceptions of the experience were strong prior to and after implementation. CONCLUSIONS: Having both required and selective EAs ensures a robust FM experience tailored to students' interests. The FM CBME curriculum allowed comparable clinical experiences despite variations in clinical sites and preceptor scope. Because of its breadth, FM is uniquely suited to address multiple competencies; this demonstrates the educational value of required FM clerkships to institutional leaders interested in implementing CBME curriculum. The CBME framework can provide a structure for more intentional student-clinic assignments based on EAs available at specific sites.
Curriculum inventory: Modeling, sharing and comparing medical education programs
The growing role of audit, quality improvement and research in health professional education programs requires increased certainty and precision in descriptions of how curricula are structured and run. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory Standard provides a technical syntax through which a wide range of different curricula can be expressed and subsequently compared and analyzed. This standard has the potential to shift curriculum mapping and reporting from a somewhat disjointed and institution-specific undertaking to something that is shared among multiple medical schools and across whole medical education systems. Given the current explosion of different models of curricula (time-free, competency-based, socially accountable, distributed, accelerated, etc.), the ability to consider this diversity using a common model has particular value in medical education management and scholarship. This article describes the development and structure of the Curriculum Inventory Standard as a way of standardizing the modeling of different curricula for audit, evaluation and research purposes. It also considers the strengths and limitations of the current standard and the implications for a medical education world in which this level of commonality, precision, and accountability for curricular practice is the norm rather than the exception.
Evaluation of a national curriculum reform effort for the medicine core clerkship
Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2000
BACKGROUND: In 1995, the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) and the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine (CDIM) developed and disseminated a new model curriculum for the medicine core clerkship that was designed to enhance learning of generalist competencies and increase interest in general internal medicine. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the dissemination and use of the resulting SGIM/CDIM Core Medicine Clerkship Curriculum Guide . DESIGN: Survey of internal medicine clerkship directors at the 125 medical schools in the United States.
Academic Medicine, 2008
Medical education is facing a convergence of challenges that the authors characterize as the four horsemen of the medical education apocalypse: teaching patient shortages, teacher shortages, conflicting systems, and financial problems. Rapidly expanding class sizes and new medical schools are coming online as medical student access to teaching patients is becoming increasingly difficult because of the decreasing length and increasing intensity of hospital stays, concerns about patient safety, patients who are stressed for time, teaching physician shortages and needs for increasing productivity from those who remain, and increasing emphasis on translational research. Further, medical education is facing reductions in funding from all sources, just as it is mounting its first major expansion in 40 years. The authors contend that medical education is on the verge of crisis and that little outside assistance is forthcoming. If medical education is to avoid a catastrophic decline, it will need to take steps to reinvent itself and make optimum use of all available resources. Curriculum materials developed nationally, increased reliance on simulation and standardized patient experiences, and
The New University of Colorado Medical School Curriculum: A Pediatric Perspective
The Journal of Pediatrics, 2007
Medicine has developed an innovative 4-year undergraduate curriculum. As a strong advocate for education and curriculum reform, Dr M. Douglas Jones Jr. created an environment for pediatrics to flourish in this new curriculum. Pediatric content has increased in all years of the curriculum, and pediatric faculty have had greater opportunities to teach and seek career development in medical education. In this report, we review the process that led to curriculum reform, provide an overview of the new curriculum design, and highlight examples of the positive impact this process has had on education in pediatrics. We hope that sharing our experience, may benefit others in medical education.
The elusive content of the medical-school curriculum: a method to the madness
Medical Teacher, 2005
A major problem for curriculum and course planners is coping simultaneously with the expanding knowledge base and having less time to teach. A widely used solution is to include huge amounts of information in the curriculum. A better solution is to identify a manageable core of relevant knowledge. One way is to begin with program goals and systematically identify content with increasing specificity that would be needed to achieve those goals. Another is the empirical determination of content, which has not been widely attempted. These studies would include experiments and practice analyses. There is a need to mount greater and more rigorous efforts to help advance the scholarship and to provide useful information to curriculum planners. Large-scale, multi-site studies that compare the results from various methods and from different sources will be more useful to medical education generally. In these days of exploding information and technology and greater understanding of how people learn, more than ever, efforts need to be focused on finding the very specific content that will result in the best learning for our students.
A medical curriculum: evaluation by final-year students
Medical Education, 1981
Seventy-five students, at the end of their final year, responded to a postal questionnaire designed to assess their views on their medical curriculum. The responses of those intending to enter general practice were compared with those of intending hospital doctors and comparisons were also made between respondents who had enrolled for a 6-year course and those who had enrolled for the newer 5-year course.
Swiss Medical Weekly
Switzerland recently introduced PROFILES, a revised version of its national outcomes reference framework for the undergraduate medical curriculum. PROFILES is based on a set of competencies adapted from the CanMEDS framework and nine entrustable professional activities (EPAs) that students have to be able to perform autonomously in the context of a predefined list of clinical situations. The nationwide implementation of such a competency- and EPA-based approach to medical education is a complex process that represents an important change to the organisation of undergraduate training in the various medical schools. At the same time, the concepts underlying PROFILES also have to be reflected at the level of the Federal Licencing Examination (FLE) and the national accreditation process. The vice-deans for education mandated a Swiss Working Group for PROFILES Implementation (SWGPI) to elaborate a guide presenting the principles and best practices based on the current scientific literatu...