Enhancing Medical Curriculum Integration from Theory to Practice; Experience of Two Arabic Medical Schools

Beyond the adoption of the principles of horizontal and vertical integration, significant planning and implementation of curriculum reform is needed. This report presents two studies done on the medical educational curriculum of Faculty of Medicine (FOM), King Abdulaziz Univerty (KAU), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia as well a local experience from FOM, Mansoura University, Egypt. The first study proposed a draft of horizontally and vertically integrated teaching on cadaveric heart between anatomy, histology, pathology and cardiology to be implemented with second year medical students at KAU in order to overcome disadvantages of traditional teaching. This proposed model could be helpful to medical schools that still adopt a traditional curriculum while introducing some innovative teaching and learning methods. The second study was an interventional one that was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary integrated cardiovascular system module on both faculty and student satisfaction and performance at KAU in the academic year 2010-2011. This model could be helpful to medical schools that are planning to go through curriculum reform from discipline-based to system based curriculum. Although FOM, Mansoura University is adopting a traditional discipline based curriculum, a neuroscience module was introduced two years ago. In this module anatomy, physiology, histology and biochemistry disciplines were horizontally integrated.