Teaching in an integrated curriculum – The perspective of a reluctant faculty member

The objective of the study. The main focus of the medical degree program in human medicine is the acquisition of practical skills necessary for the practice of the medical profession, its theoretical and scientific foundation and the examination of diagnostic procedures with the aid of technical and communicative means. The mediation of these medical contents should generate a broad and lasting knowledge among the students, taking into account the current scientific knowledge, coupled with a cosmopolitan, critical and patient-oriented attitude. Students will be prepared for their aspired profession with a problem-solving orientation and enabled to lifelong learning. The concept of this curriculum is based on the flexible acquisition of new forms of teaching and learning on the parallel acquisition of medical knowledge and scientific, communicative and psychosocial competences. Material and methods. For the development of the curriculum at the SFU Medical Faculty we used and consulted the reform Curricula of the Universities of Freiburg, Basel, Bern, Maastricht and the Berlin Charité and the RWTH Aachen. The medical degree program is structured according to the Bologna architecture into a bachelor's and a master's degree, each of which can be completed individually. It is a modular system that organizes the recognition and therapy of disease-related problems of the human organism in interdisciplinary topics. Results. The SFU decided to adopt in his curriculum the CanMEDS model, so the graduates should be trained optimally for their medical profession. The degree program is divided into a Bachelor and a Master's degree program shared by six semesters each. The teaching is modular interdisciplinary organ- and system-centered. The basic concept is - following the example of German and Swiss Reform curricula - the unit of preclinical and clinical teaching. The goal here to develop students with a responsible medical attitude. The former “classic” concept "first theory, then practice" is dissolved. The curriculum focuses more on individual body parts and organ systems which are taught in blocks ("modules"). Conclusions. This new way in teaching is called "organ-centered learning". The medical curriculum is designed as a learning spiral. Starting from the first semester students are confront with clinical disease pattern. Until the end of the sixth semester of the bachelor program each organ system is discussed in a preclinical and clinical unit. In the Master program the entire organ systems are taught at a higher level, including in the last year a clinical year. One of the greatest challenges teaching in a new curriculum is the teaching staff. Most of medical teacher have undergone a “classic” teaching career and therefore there must be flexibility in approaching a new teaching concepts. Anatomy is one of the classic disciplines suffering reorganization in a modular teaching curriculum. As an anatomy teacher the author describes the challenges that occur when restructuring didactical concepts.